Posts by timrowledge

The empire of C++ strikes back with Safe C++ blueprint

If you need ‘extensions’ then you are never going to actually make it safe. A sensible language doesn’t require you to think about memory allocation or freeing

SpaceX blasts being stuck in bureaucratic orbit as Starship approval slips

Re: Welcome to the real world...

When that’s the best way to make a civilization work, fuck yes.

If you don’t have a decently functioning civilization then none of your money or freedom mean anything because some nasty bugger will come along, scream “you money or your life!” and take both.

So suck it up buttercup and pay your dues.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix

I had an R260(?) with 8Mb for a while, part of working on the Active Book stuff. I think. It was an awful long time ago. And the Active Book had a sorta-Unix at bottom.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Mine was a really simple one I wrote in NS32032 assembler for a board I built, with a Pluto graphics processor and a VAX 11/730 as a disk server. And a Beeb, just because. And a 6dof input thing I made. A whole 2fps!

Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?

Re: They keep talking about making more than just an Autocomplete, and yet...

“That feels like we're making slaves.”

Well, yes. That has been the intent of them with power since time immemorial.

Re: Wrong Question?

A colleague refers to them as”large liability models”which seems about right to me

Raspberry Pi 5 slims down for cut-price 2 GB RAM version

Re: "How much?!?"

1990 called and wants it’s stupid jokes back

Re: Vision

No, blame people for saying dumb things

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: Nope. LaTex shipped after the Mac and long after the Alto..."notes"...you're joking?

“Running SmallTalk80 and some very nice WYSIWYG editors.” Small point of pedantry here “Smalltalk-80”. We were doing nice font properly spaced documents around 1972.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!..LibreWrite mostly very low use code

It ran very nicely on my prototype ARM3 machine. I used it for a lot of business paperwork and eventually even my part of a mildly successful programming book. Computer Concepts did quite well with it.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

My iMac 2012 is still just fine. Like this ‘13 iPad. And iPhone 4. Just a little care and things can work for quite a while.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

Re: Foundations of Geopolitics

Jellied eel is a regular purveyor of nonsenses and best ignored or blocked

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

And imagine my startlement when a young woman that worked for me (being in Silicon Valley at the time) explained that she needed to go home to do some soddering.

Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy'

Re: systemdOS

“As noted elsewhere, we're rapidly heading toward systemdOS”

I think you meant system DOS...

Raspberry Pi unveils Hailo-powered AI Kit to make the model 5 smarter

Re: Love a piece of Pi

If you have unused Pi, donate them to a suitable club, maker space, school or whatever.

The Canon Cat – remembering the computer that tried to banish mice

Not that anyone would ever do that to some poor unsuspecting person. No way.

You OK, Apple? Seriously, your silicon lineup is … a mess

Re: Really?

You have to remember that if Apple released a phone/pad/Mac that had infinite performance, million year battery life, exabyte/sec bandwidth, weighed less than a gram, was free forever ... people here would still find some way to whine about The Apple Tax etc.

NASA plasma propulsion project promises Mars in a flash

Re: "manned missions to Mars to be completed within a mere two months"

Time dilation. 4 years is not.... 4 years . There’s an equation. No, I don’t remember it at this time of night.

Hillary Clinton: 2024 will be 'ground zero' for AI election manipulation

Isn’t it strange how only the elections he loses are fraudulent...

BBC exterminates AI experiments used to promote Doctor Who

Re: You will be upgraded, resistance is futile

Surely somebody has made “The Wrath of Karen”?

Raspberry Pi OS 5.2 is here, with pleasant tweaks to Wayland-based desktop

GPIO was changed to the upstream standard.

Re: Pi OS

Changing to use X instead of Wayland takes a few seconds and a reboot. I expect you could manage that without too much pain.

Venturing beyond the default OS on Raspberry Pi 5

Re: Debian

Take a look at ‘sdm’, a set of simple(ish) she’ll scripts that can help you build that personal OS setup for a Pi. See https://github.com/gitbls/sdm

Worked very well for me setting up a dozen Pi 5 & 4 and probably would work for most machines and distros.

Starting over: Rebooting the OS stack for fun and profit

Almost exclusively Squeak, occasionally Cuis (a fork focussing on quality vector graphics and some new ui ideas), very occasionally Pharo (another fork focussing on some ideas about pushing boundaries and production). Very rarely, Visual Works but I’m not really pleased with how it has changed since I was the engineering manager back in the 90s.

Re: No. Sorry, just /no/.

No, I suspect you inferred ‘operating’ in front of ‘system ‘ in my comment. Just as C has no language constructs for I/o (well, it didn’t last time I had to use it, who knows these days) Smalltalk needs no language construct for ownership etc. The system written in it can have whatever you want. And yes, perhaps some VM support would be nice, but we’ve done that plenty of times before.

Also I think you’re forgetting that in practical usage we do still run Smalltalk on an OS and make use of that OS. The trick is to try to make it easy to do everything from within Smalltalk. We do fairly well but not perfect.

On a Raspberry Pi 5 (not even one with an NVME hat) my working Smalltalk image goes from d-click to ready to start typing in essentially no time - an eyeblink at most. It includes all the development tools, code browsing tools - that use proper antialiased, proportionally spaced fonts, compiler, a bunch of games, a web application development system, documentation system, web server framework, code & version management system, graphics libraries, database connectivity (Postgres in this particular instances)... everything. Bang, there, ready. If I need to copy it across to a different machine - maybe my x64 Ubuntu-box, or a colleague’s Widows machine, or a Mac, it will work identically on that.

It just makes sense.

Re: Well, at least this reminded me to have a play

Load a copy of Squeak (from Squeak dot .org) on your Pi and read a few books (legally) downloaded from http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html and/or watch some relevant YouTube videos. And join the Squeak mailing list.

I’ve been making a living with Smalltalk (almost entirely on ARM) for a tad over 40 years and any time I have to spend on nasty textfile languages is anathema. Just today I had to poke at a Python program to fix a problem and.. no, just no. That is so very not the way to do it.

Re: No. Sorry, just /no/.

“environments such as Smalltalk and Lisp suffer from not having per-object ownership and access rights”

I claim that

A) this is not something ones suffers from. It’s my objects. Nobody else gets to play there.

B) this is not something for the language to handle, it would be for the system

C) pretty sure gemstone can provide it

Re: Hit-and-Miss

Smalltalk can do version control perfectly well, thank you very much. For code centric uses, there is Monticello, or changesets, or Tonel/git, or Pundles and so forth. For more info centric needs people have made assorted solutions ranging from simple to expansive (gemstone, for example).

I mean, seriously, if it couldn’t, how could so many important ideas have been originated in it?

Re: The argument for keeping different horses for different courses runs thus...

Evidently you’ve not heard of Gemstone. A vastly capable database Smalltalk. Gemtalksystems dot com.

Venus has a quasi-moon and it's just been named 'Zoozve' for a sweet reason

Re: Our Moon Is A “Quasi-Moon”, Too

Let’s not forget Cruithne

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

Re: Slow down

Insurrection is a fundamentally political offence. It’s an internal equivalent of treason. It’s selling out the polity in order to improperly take control.

Road to Removal: A blueprint for yanking billions of tons of CO2 out of our atmosphere

Re: start preparing ourselves for an inevitable further rise in sea level

Another good thing about Canada is that we won’t be letting you in

Re: Population reduction

Could somebody please reboot the LLM software behind this “user” account? It’s clearly absorbed too much trash from the wingnutosphere and gone full Reich

Re: That's some weapons grade disinformation...

This level of wrongness must surely take immense effort to achieve. Unless of course you’re simply pasting prepared bullshit from your Oil Shill Club sources.

Re: start preparing ourselves for an inevitable further rise in sea level

You’re not going to be moving north into Canada; the Canadian Shield geology pretty much has no soil. Do explain how you expect to grow food .

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: Survival characteristics

“I don't care for Smalltalk, which in its original form contains an idiotic decision to color-code source code”

No it didn’t. The original Smalltalk couldn’t have, since it ran monochrome. Stop bullshitting.

Many modern Smalltalk systems *can* syntax if you want them to. And if you don’t, then set the preferences to not do it.

Re: A lot of design points were being explored at that time

You should perhaps take a look at the debuggers we have now.

Re: A lot of design points were being explored at that time

"those ancient Lisp and Smalltalk workstations had limitations: they were single-processor and single threaded "

Single processor, yes mostly - there were exceptions. Single threaded - nonsense. Smalltalk has had multi-threaded execution since.. well almost forever.

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

"And of course, rebooting didn’t help, because the change was permanently made to your system VM image."

No; just no. That's not what happened then, and not what happens now.

Re: What Is A “Workstation”?

Y'what? That is total and utter nonsense. Smalltalk has *always* been able to pass code around. From simple text files, to imagesegments, to Monticello packages, to the git based system Pharo uses, Envy, Metacello... How the hell did you think we share and collaborate?

Re: Dynamic Languages

Smalltalk is the only language good enough to be worth the effort of critiquing. The rest are just dead text in dreary files. Don't waste your time; you only have so much of it.

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Congratulations on the stupidest thing I’ve seen so far today

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

Re: The problem is unchanged

“But I have to drive 2500 miles each way to work, twice a day because I work split shifts, towing a 42ft boat made of Iridium”

Re: EVs not selling?

Funny; there a *lot* of Tesla’s of various vintage around here and they all seem to make their owners pretty happy. I’ve never yet seen one with dodgy panel gaps, or who pay wheels, or any other problem beyond being a bit expensive up front. And even that is reducing.

Re: EVs not selling?

No it’s not just you. There are lots of people being just as dumb.

Re: Interesting lines from the article

Well at least they’re not attempting to steal the country like the previous maladministration did.

Maverick Mars chopper has survived way past its warranty – now it's time for a sequel

Re: Mk 2 feature

Given that Mars is the only planet where all the Linux sound systems actually work, that might be doable

BOFH: Monitor mount moans end in Beancounter beatdown

Re: Been there as well

I occasionally point people at the old Byte August 1981 edition (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n296/mode/1up?view=theater) to introduce them to Smalltalk, but it has the secondary value of having hilarious pricing.

For example, 64Kb ram S100 bus cards for a mere $995. Osborne 1 a mere $1795. 300 baud modems just $799! Atari 800 with a whole 32k ram $759.

Arm grabs a slice of Raspberry Pi to sweeten relationship with IoT devs

Re: I remember when

It’s a computer. It has what you load it with. Want it set up to use as a modest desktop? OK. Want it set up as a NAS? OK. A 3D printer controller? Sure.

If you want an “educational workstation “ load one of the setups produced by a variety of groups that have put in work to make them. You have GPIO pins to drive a staggering list of cool doohickeys that can teach about sensors and motors and effectors and imagers and noise makers and hell, control a nuclear reactor.