The collected works of commodorejohn - Page 4

I have less of a problem with VM languages when the VM isn't wholly own and directed by one company and also when the VM doesn't itself consume hundreds of megabytes but mostly gets used for functionality that Visual Basic provided in less than one.

The only problem with that is that Microsoft keeps kneecapping Windows by gradually eroding its advantages (backwards compatibility and a broad slate of compatible software and simple no-nonsense UI) while try to chase the success that's so consistently eluding them in the tablet market. Windows 8 is damn near unusable until you employ third-party hacks to make it less retarded, and even Windows 7 did stupid shit like bring that goddamn Office 2007 Playskool-activity-center bar into Explorer and remove a lot of the options for making it behave like older versions. Windows 10 doesn't look to be seriously reversing the trend, either.

I keep going back and forth on the free Unices (love the concept, hate the way 90% of developers don't give two shits for good UI, and Linux/the major desktop environments in particular seems to have gotten so invested in the idea of taking over for Windows that they've started copying everything it's doing wrong to boot,) but the one thing that continues to make me want to make it work as a daily driver is the prospect of being able to just set myself up with a single software environment and then never have to put up with stupid UI changes again.

wenp wrote: I've finally accepted that's never going to happen. Even if I make a comfortable setup in NetBSD or OS/2, it's like living on a desert island when practically everyone I might want to exchange software with is on Windows. I've basically resigned myself to using software whose design is repulsive but objectively allows me to get more work done. Is that wisdom or the defeatism of old age?

Man, it's not even about purity of design or anything, it's just so. Much. Hassle . From my first PC running Windows 95 up through my most recent XP installs, I've been able to establish and maintain a consistent workflow for just about everything I do; even where later versions made irritating changes, dealing with it was as simple as finding a couple options in the system settings to revert to the old behaviors and there you were. Ever since Vista, though, not only have they been slowly strangling backwards compatibility and making stupid changes in the UI, they've been removing all the options to fix the stupid things, because somebody in the High Church of St. Sinofsky has a bug up their ass about people not appreciating all their retarded design decisions.

So my workflow of over a decade (at the time) was broken, and it only continued to get broken-er, for no other reason than that somebody at Microsoft decided that users should no longer get to have any say in how their OS behaved. My choices, then, were: to adapt to the new version and hope that subsequent changes didn't make things any worse (they did); to keep using XP indefinitely, trusting that a decent antivirus would keep me safe when the security updates ran out and hoping that manufacturers would continue to provide drivers for their hardware (this is mostly what I've done since that time); or, to attempt to move to an alternative that, while it had a higher initial learning curve, would allow me to basically be over and done with the pointless-changes treadmill after that (which I've tried repeatedly over the years, but have yet to really manage to stick with.)

(And, of course, all that time I've had the pleasure of repeatedly being told that I'm a horrible unreasonable stupid no-good Luddite for wanting to just be able to learn one way of doing things and then stick with it by countless people on the Internet, to which I reply: why is it my job to waste my time adapting my workflow to suit someone else's demands? Isn't the whole point of personal computers for them to serve the user , rather than the manufacturer? Ha ha, no, of course it isn't, that's why everything is getting locked down now.)

guardian452 wrote: and now that laptop batteries outlast a typical working day, what is the point of being able to swap one out.

Because batteries wear out and lose their ability to hold a charge, that's why. When the battery in my ThinkPad wears out, I can shell out $20-30 on eBay and get a perfectly satisfactory replacement, rather than having to shell out for a whole new laptop.

(Of course, given that almost everybody making laptops these days builds cheap shit that begins falling apart the minute the extended warranty period expires, I suppose there's less call for that now. Still, if I were paying upwards of $1000 for a laptop, I'd damn well want to be able to replace the battery at least.)

I'm personally kinda bummed that the new macbook, despite having eliminated "all but one" port to rule them all, still has a headphone socket.

That's because you're mentally ill. Failing to discard useful features is not a shortcoming.

I never leave DHCP disabled on a system that supports it.

robespierre wrote: Pages are a virtual memory concept. I can't think of too many 6502s that implement virtual memory, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there.

No, "pages" on the 6502 are sections of 256 bytes, although the only ones that are special are zero page (which can be addressed in a single byte, as well as also having the only general-purpose indirect-addressing modes) and page 1 (which doesn't have any special addressing modes, but serves as the stack.)

OP: As has been stated, and as you more or less inferred, $0600 is just the conventional way of writing a 16-bit hexadecimal number, and doesn't have anything to do with the endianness of the CPU. A value of $0600 stored in memory on the 6502 is going to look like $00 $06 in a hex dump, but on a 68000 it would be $06 $00 instead.

You'll find his picture in the dictionary next to "Unwarranted Self-Importance."

TeamBlackFox wrote: He would criticize your use of OS X, development of Classilla and TenFourFox based upon their license not being GPLv3, berate your non free hardware and AJX usage and narcissistically claim you are inferior to him. All in the span of just 5 minutes.

Bah, that's small potatoes. You're not really in trouble until he starts singing .

Oh drool . I'll have to post when I get the Jupiter-6 I've got lined up, just to avenge my jealousy...

See if you can line up some kind of music board (there were a few for S100, though I don't have any specific suggestions.) Nothing like that early computer music...

Someone mentioned The Monster Squad so I've been summoned to say that movie is excellent and everyone should watch it.

Also, contacting the CEO might not work, but I seriously doubt it would hurt to try.

It is an interesting point that the most likely outcome of making the IRIX source available isn't an IRIX revival, but the appropriation of a handful of components into the Linux ecosystem. The philosophy of the GNU and Linux developer communities overall (and, consequently, a large part of the open-source community as a whole) has always been "embrace, extend, ASSIMILATE!" and I don't doubt that's mostly what we'd see here, if it came to pass. It's only to be expected when you make your software also an ideology.

But that doesn't mean it wouldn't still be a good thing to have it available.

The fact that someone could make constructive use of it. Whether or not someone will is all academic if they can't .

Speaking of MIDI, is there any decent lightweight general-purpose sequencer application for *nix that could run on IRIX? I took a look around at stuff in the Debian repositories during my last Linux experiment and it seems like everything there is either a full-scale Sibelius-style sheet-music notation program or a "because all anyone will ever want to do is techno loops!" FruityLoops clone, and all of them weighed in at obscene sizes...you'd think for a standard that's as old as the Commodore 64 and requires less than a 38.4Kbps serial connection, there would be some less ridiculously bloated software available.

Because you have a Mac LISP machine board (a fun vintage-computing rarity) and you want to do something with it?

mia wrote: Can MacIvory genera binaries run on OpenGenera?

Actually, how does Genera do binaries? Is it actual machine code for the LISP-machine CPU, or do they take the LISP thing and run with it and just store programs as lists of cons cells and values? That could be pretty portable, assuming compatible word sizes and such, though you'd need some way to relocate and link it with whatever the system has in the way of a global set of primitives/system calls.

foetz wrote: 176mb pdf

Musta been scanned at 300 dots per molecule...

In the last week or so, I've gotten notifications for replies to threads that I've never subscribed to, and that the forum software doesn't even tell me I'm subscribed to when I look. What's goin' on here?

Specific threads:
viewtopic.php?p=7380194
viewtopic.php?p=7380267

viewtopic.php?t=16729675

This one too.

vishnu wrote:

magnet wrote: Im curious, has anyone ever ported an old mac os (system 7 or 8 ) to a MIPS SGI? Im not educated in fruit OS. Many years back I had a PowerBook 1400c....a beautiful laptop for its generation. I regret disposing of it But I digress....

Uh, wouldn't you need the source code to mac os 7 or 8 to do that? Did Apple release that source code? I must have missed that press release...

I believe the source for one version of System 7 actually did make the rounds back in the day (I think you can still find it online somewheres,) but it certainly wasn't actually released to the general public.

Besides, it seems like it would be much simpler to just port Basilisk to IRIX.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I'll be the token classic Mac OS defender: under the hood, it's crap. But when it works, the user experience is excellent, which is why we're still saying FTFF in OS X 13 years after Steve-o eulogized OS 9 at WWDC.

I'll join you in that. I got my start on classic Mac OS, and even though it had its shortcomings I've never used another OS whose user experience was anywhere near as nice.

Baseball has better music.

Ooh, please share Dunno if you're getting a QBus or Unibus model, but if you wind up with any interesting extra bits for QBus 11s I'd love to know...

Smalltalk is my current esoteric-language-of-choice, just for being the only "purist" language I can recall that looked at all practical to write programs in. (Yes, yes, LISP is very pretty, now give me some human-readable data structures and painless local variables before I break into hives!) It's a shame it got so locked-in to the "everything in one system image" notion of the Alto, because it'd be a fun language in which to hack up quick utility programs if it weren't for the fact that there's no practical means of separating the program from the operating environment...

But hamei, it's free and full of love!

hamei wrote: Hell, we may as well re-invent the wheel three times a week ... which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Loonix does.

Hell, it's basically Lennart Poettering's entire reason for existing...

Machines that are on the network get the names of the planets from C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. No particular reason why, other than that I love those books.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Given all the crap Lenovo's pulled of late, I'd love one ... from some other company under license.

Yeah, there's that...on the other hand, I'd kill for a 4:3 laptop in this era of inevitable widescreen crap.

guardian452 wrote: Why? It's a windows machine, it plays my xbox when I'm in bed and watch movies on. What else are you doing in windows that you would need a bigger screen for?

It's not about the screen resolution , it's about the aspect ratio . 16:9 makes sense for a movie theater because the whole point is to fill the entire field of view, but on a computer it sucks. Maximizing a document on a widescreen laptop means that reading it requires way too much left-to-right-to-left travel for my eyes (since most paragraphs are now two or three lines of ~120-200 characters,) or requires me to crank up the font size to the point where the information density is roughly on par with an Atari 2600 game (since there's so little vertical room.) And not maximizing it isn't a good option, either, since the only OS that does tiling all that well is *nix (and even that could be a lot better.) 4:3 just works better than other aspect ratios (5:4 is pretty alright too, but I doubt anybody's ever done that on a laptop.)

But naturally, since everybody is buying 16:9 TVs to win the dick-measuring contest against their neighbors, we have to make computers fit the same pattern, no matter what. And hey, computers are just glorified TVs for a whole bunch of people now, so who cares about anybody actually trying to do work on them!?

Sounds like a recipe for workplace shootings.

All the games worth playing were designed when 4:3 was the rule.

Well, except for the Gameboy ones.

Same here, I couldn't get on all day until now.

Yeah, and throwing the entire screen off-balance because (AFAIK) neither Windows nor OSX allow you to have a corresponding bar on the other side of the screen to make the space symmetrical?

Yeah, the interface is a bit janky but overall it's surprisingly useful. Certainly a better no-nonsense paint program than 90% of the junk in the Debian repositories.

I'm not worried about artificial intelligence (which I've yet to see any reason to suspect that we'll ever manage to create) nearly as much as I'm worried about artificial "intelligence" (which there's already way too much of) and the natural idiots who want to put it in charge of every goddamn thing these days.

hamei wrote: Well, not really. That's not intelligence. That's "following instructions". You can set up a row of dominoes, then push the first one so they all fall down in a row. Is that "intelligence" ?

But, but, but hamei, it's The Future now! Or if it isn't, we can make it be The Future by just insisting hard enough! What are you, some kind of filthy Luddite , that you don't believe in The Future!?

hamei wrote: Where did you get this idea ? Chess is problem-solving but it's not intelligence. Never has been.

Moreover, it's problem-solving that is actually incredibly well-suited to a computer, since the state of the board and the possible moves from each state are so limited that even a Commodore 64 can plan several moves ahead without taking too long. And it's problem-solving that's challenging for humans, because we only have a limited capacity for holding temporary state in our heads without either committing it to long-term memory or writing it down. The only thing surprising about it is that computers didn't beat humans at it sooner. But try and find problems in the real world that are that constrained - good luck with that.

P4 wasn't even the top of the lineup when it was new. When an architecture sucks so bad that the manufacturer decides to make a successor by taking the previous architecture and slapping a faster bus on it, that says a lot.

Everything's Itanium's fault, really.

Yep. HUZZAH FOR HOMOGENEITY AND MONOCULTURE.

(Then again, avoiding monoculture in processor architecture is only so much good when everybody insists on using Lunix as the base for everything so they can all run the exact same software with the exact same vulnerabilities...Heartbleed, anyone?)

Oh, of course not. The Holy Kernel is blameless and pure. *genuflect* *genuflect* *genuflect*

It's just another fine example of everybody using one single solution everywhere ever and then being terribly shocked when someone finds a hole in it and then has the keys to the kingdom everywhere in the world.