Posts by Hi Wreck 162 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2008
That was COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), the language meant for pointy-haired bosses and those who like to type "multiply" instead of "*".
FORTRAN (Formula Translation) was for the Boffins. And as a historical note, the predecessor to Doom was Adventure. It was quite the dusty deck!
If only Intel had spent the Billions of dollars they incinerated in share-holder buybacks and other financial engineering on actual real engineering, they would likely not need the bailout from Uncle Sam (CHIPS Act) and might actually have a product that customers want. But Wall Street knows best (until the company is gutted, that is).
Mac OS is the Mach (Carnegie Mellon) kernel with BSD Unix tacked on top. Linux is more System V (original AT&T). You can see the differences with the myriad of options in “ps” (ps aux vs. ps -efl) and “ls”. It gets muddled at times, though. Apple seems to want to excise itself of any of the GNU stuff (switching to zsh from bash, clang from gcc, etc.). Mind you, as long as eMacs works, I’m a happy camper.
I could never get into any of the bloated visual IDE crap. Perhaps that's from getting tennis elbow from using smalltalk back in the days I guess. All that space wasted for boxes filled with this and that and the need to click-click-click on a mouse.
Emacs still works like a charm for development and is clocking in at about 50MB of RAM on my Mac. 45MB of that is likely for the framework stuff being dragged in. And if you must use vi, there is vim mode. And yes, I use it on Windows for those rare occasions I actually spin up a Windows box.
Kudos to Apple to shrinking the PCB down to a System-on-a-chip. Welcome to the world where physical chips are becoming obsolete and where companies can now stick whatever bits and pieces they need into a single device and then get TMSC or whomever to churn out countless copies. Seymore Cray recognized memory bandwidth as an issue during the Jurasic era of computing - his machines were a marvel at the time. Shedding an external memory bus allows a lot of innovation in the memory system,. As for bemoaning the ability to plug in other stuff onto a bus, you need new stuff to plug into the new Universal Serial Bus.
If Job's wanted virtualization, Apple would still be using PPC (or even 68k) chips. The X86 was a bitch to virtualize given the unprivileged access to the processor status word for reads. Kudos to vmware for actually figuring out how to get it done. I suspect it was AMD who fixed that too.
"How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it's going to be about the Microsoft graph."
I guess you now need a satnav to figure your way through "the graph".
Assembly? Surely you jest. Today's compilers will do a far better job of scheduling instructions than all but the most experienced assembly programmers, and when the architecture of the machine changes (including our beloved Intel x86), it takes a lot less time to recompile than to recode. Put a steak into it.
I had the iPhone X for about three days before it was returned because it basically became useless while driving and I was having to pull the thing out of my pocket and hold it up to my face for three seconds to check a text..
Perhaps being a pain in the arse to check a text while driving is a good thing.
It's not the kernel that's ossified, it's the applications. Windows itself suffers from 'junk DNA' which has accumulated throughout the years resulting in the bloated mess that exists today. The windows kernel has run on a variety of platforms in the past, and will continue to do so with windows 10, as MS plans on running it on pretty well everything. The brilliance of Apple (and DEC for that matter when moving from the VAX to the Alpha) was the ability to translate legacy code to a new architecture (rosetta for Apple). Furthermore, Apple deprecates code faster than most people change their underwear, so old applications either adapt or die. If MS had allowed legacy x86 cruft to run on ARMs or Itanics [sic], perhaps the x86 would have sunk to it's most richly deserved place on the bottom of the ocean.
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