
Ti-51...
I still have three or four working Ti-SR-51s of various versions sitting in a draw (good for stats) so I am in no need of mere emulators (followed by evil 'ha ha ha' laugh)!
187 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2011
I used to use, and program for, System 7. You'd be lucky if it stayed up for a whole day - it just crashed on me for no apparent reason even when just using it for word processing. SunOS3.5, on the other hand, stayed solid for months despite my imposing all sorts of horrible 'optimisations' on it using bits of 68K assembler I barely understood, embedded in C. Moral of the story - simple UI good, stable OS better.
BMW are pretty good at supporting their products. A few years ago, when I had a 1974 BMW R90S, BMW still had all the parts available new together with all the manuals. After I bought it I got it serviced at a BMW dealership and they replaced worn components of the braking systems with new parts. I think the bike must have been about 40 years old at the time. Slightly off topic, but compare that to support for phones!
As a junior academic, but with some IT skills, I was once given the task of determining whether our senior IT technician, who had been caught 'red-handed' watching porn, had downloaded or viewed any illegal material. This was a very strange task, but the strangest, and hardest (not intended as ooh-err-missus) part was that I was expected to write a report for the Head of Department describing exactly what sort of things he had been watching even if they were not illegal. A rather tricky assignment, and I was never quite clear why the non-illegal material had to be desired in detail!
Is it an Apple issue or an ARM issue? Are there lots of ARM implementations out there based on ARM8.3 that have this pointer authentication issue or is it just the M1? BTW it sounds as if you are worse off with no pointer authentication than with pointer authentication that takes minutes to crack. I'm not an expert in such matters - just interested to know the answers.
I was surprised that the author didn't include Sun's desktops in his or her survey. I really liked the Sun desktop that preceded Broken-Look (SunView that came with SunOS3.5, not the networking one). It was also fabulously easy to write applications for. All of the functions for creating and managing windows were varargs where the arguments were 'option' 'value' pairs. Any that you didn't specify had sensible defaults. You could actually see the event handling loop and so it was easy to insert a function (or functions) into it to trap events you wanted to deal with, everything else, again, was handled with sensible defaults.
I was one of those people paid by IBM in the early 80's to do some of these UI studies. We ran experiments where people used an editor where insert/overtype mode was either indicated by a change in the cursor (flashing block or flashing underline) or an indicator in a status bar which could be at various locations. We not only tested user reactions and editing speed, but we even eye-tracked them while they used the editor (pretty difficult at the time - the eye-tracker involved subjects wearing centre-less contact lenses with circular coils of wire embedded in them and much physics). The attention to details like this was really impressive.
Also, as the editor we used (ELM I think) was the (quite advanced for the time) standard on our University's MTS operating system, I could have fun replacing the standard ELM with one where the edit mode would change randomly with no indication, or the mode indicator would change but the mode wouldn't or both would change randomly, but independently. One of those great things where people begin to doubt their sanity. That wasn't strictly part of the project, but, as I said, mischevious fun. Anyway, thank you IBM for employing me (indirectly) for a year.
I'm a cognitive neuropsychologist, but with a bit of a computational background (spent a summer at the Santa Fe Institute, refereed things about physics of computation, that sort of thing). Dr. Verstynen is right to draw an analogy with chaotic dynamics, but the brain situation is even worse. Typically, when one studies chaos the system is isolated - in brains new perturbations from the outside world keep bumping into it and the system never has the chance to settle into stable attractor dynamics - it is always on the way there - it never arrives (until we die). There are probably transient, sort of predictable, quasi-stable states induced by signals from outside world, but I don't think we have much of an idea at all about how these are formed and how they affect the rest of the brain. All a bit hand-wavy, but, at this stage that's probably all you're going to get. Elon is talking out of his hat.
Yrs truly, A Professor.
I hooked up a Canon 5DS SLR as a webcam during serious serious lockdown. It was just something to do to while away the time. A bit excessive, but you could control DOF and focal length. The image was very good, much better than my webcam, even when downscaled to 720.
The 1+ Billion Euro 10-year EU Human Brain Project, which has similar aims and much, much more academic input, has not, by most accounts, been a glittering success. As lots of other people have said, we really know very little in detail about how interactions between neurons in the brain give rise to useful information processing. We don't know which properties need to be simulated and which are irrelevant. There is certainly a great deal of analog computation involved. Some of this is likely intra-cellular. There are lots of cell types which are not neurons but which may play some role. I am not optimistic. (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience by trade)
I still have a 5150, Mono, 64K with original keyboard and monitor sitting on top of a filing cabinet in my office. It is an incredible thing. You could drive a truck over it and it would be unscathed. Also came with a manual containing the assembly source for the BIOS which was super useful for my job at the time which involved researching user interface design by mucking around with the cursor as a status indicator. We got a FORTAN compiler for it at some point, so I programmed it in FORTRAN with all the real stuff in MASM (I think - long time ago).
To quote Forbes: "By law, American companies have to report child abuse and exploitation imagery on their servers to NCMEC, which then works with law enforcement on an investigation. Other tech giants do the same when emails or messages are sent over their platforms. That includes Google, Microsoft and Facebook."
Again, nowhere in the same league, but something that surprised me nevertheless. I was a very junior postdoc in the UK doing some programming on a project in vision science on a new Mac II. I was having trouble manipulating colour tables in the vertical retrace interrupt which didn't seem to behave in the way they were described in 'Inside Macintosh' so I posted a question to the appropriate usenet new group (including my academic affiliation, address and phone number). The next day I received a phone call from someone who said they were with Apple and would like to try and help with my problem. The phone line wasn't great and was getting worse so I offered to call back after about quarter of an hour - they bloke on the other end said not to try unless I could get free international calls as he was calling from Cupertino. I was bowled over. Also we sorted out my problem.
El Bobbo is a mysterious enigma within a deep but incomprehensible poem. He probably allowed Starbucks to use a song because the shade of green in their logo reminded him of the guitar owned by some legendary bluesman whose name no one knows and of whom no songs were ever recorded and where none remain alive who heard him play. [ Married to a Dylan fan, so I know of that about which I speak. ]
This conference paper is ridiculously cool, and the optical sensor they use (with great success), a MAX30105 only costs about a tenner (I've just ordered one to play with for integrating into VR with Unity).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589631932631X
Isn't the performance of the M1 predicated on tight, SoC, coupling between its various components - CPUs, GPU, Memory, NN thing, etc.? My (not very educated) guess would be that this means an Mx supporting discrete graphics etc. is a bit unlikely. They could up the ante on the built in graphics, or the built in memory, but you aren't going to add more yourself and maintain performance.
Just as a point of interesting information, a paper was published fairly recently that demonstrated that a species of fish (a cleaner wrasse) could pass a fish-oriented version of the mirror self-recognition test https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021. Now this may, or may not, demonstrate that fish have a sense of self. What it does do, is cause one to question exactly what the mirror self-recognition test itself demonstrates. Maybe one has to think a little more carefully about the means by which one might test whether an animal (or an infant) is self-aware.
One might also think about this issue when deciding whether all of the "I've seen my dog do xyz so it is obvious that it has some human-like mental world" are actually worth paying any attention to. One of the founders of comparative psychology in the 19th century, George Romanes, tried to develop a theory of comparative intelligence by collecting and collating such anecdotes - it was an abject failure. I wrote some lectures about this decades ago that were posted on the web by other academic sites (with my permission) - not sure if they're still up...
God there are a lot of the "I think xyz is true so it must be" brigade out today. The idea in science is that we test hypotheses in order to assess their validity. But I see I'm wrong here - all we need to do is have an opinion.
ps I think this will be downvoted by exactly the same group of people who believe opinion trumps science. Did you see what I did there?
I had a Sun 3/60 many years ago. One thing I think I remember about SunOS 3.2 and 3.5, but my memory might be faulty, was that they had a partition scheme in which stuff you really shouldn't mess with was mounted read-only. I think it saved me, an academic not a proper sysadmin, on more than one occasion. This was around the same time that one of my colleagues decided to remove all the unused files in /dev on the departmental server (another Sun box) - enough remained in memory to rescue the system from the command line. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man (me) is King.
I taught programming to university students on the BBC Micro - their work was 'saved' on cassettes. Got some disc drives later and so could play Elite while they struggled with the exercises. I was quite amazed at the 3D feel of Elite and how immersed you got, even if it was all green lines. The game I remember being even more impressed with was the free flight simulator (not really simulator, not realistic, just fun) on the first Archimedes. There was also a flight sim game on SGI workstations around then (maybe even a bit later) and the Archimedes one was just as good apart from the fact that you could network the SGIs if you happened to have a few Indigos or Irises lying around.