Posts by timrowledge

Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance

Re: A quick question

Some of my Smalltalk from the early 80s is still in use, but folks like Dan Ingalls have code from circa 72 in there. And yes, still making a living from it.

Re: More personal.

Nah: software is only finished when the last customer dies.

ChatGPT's odds of getting code questions correct are worse than a coin flip

Re: Soooo....

At least at the beginning it was confidently telling people I was the British astronaut geologist in Apollo 17. Whilst also being in charge of MI5 in Cairo.

Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock paywalled features

Re: I need heated seats like…

In -20C Canadian winter your arse would thank you.

Ultra-rare Apple sneakers from the 1990s on sale for $50,000

Re: What is it with people collecting modern. plastic shoes, anyway?

I think a lot of it is simply acquisition of money laundering tokens. Houses, artworks, somewhat unique or at least rare items like original iPhones etc are just symbols of value that can be exchanged with less chance of triggering tracing or taxing.

MIT discovery suggests a new class of superconductors

Re: Knok-nock, Neo

No - they broke it whilst trying to be gods in their own reality and had to settle for being ersatz god-like entities in the somewhat damaged one we occupy. This explains both Dark Energy and the unfathomable popularity of Farrago, Bozo, Drumpf, and related jackasses.

Re: "Room temperature"

Well I’d hope that making *really good* ice cream was high on that list

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Thoughts from a [mostly] Windows user

“excellent Desktop environments,”?

I’ve never yet seen an excellent desktop on a Unix machine. But I’ve only been using Unix machines since ‘82 so I’m no expert.

Re: Beautiful? Really?

Grainy fonts? In RiscOS? You must have had some unusual settings. Until really high dpi screens arrived there really wasn’t any competition for ROS fonts. And don’t forget they worked on machines with barely any memory.

Techies all GUI-eyed as Xerox says goodbye to Palo Alto Research Center

Re: Need to cut them slack

For those interested in hearing from the people that *made* and *used* the Alto, consider joining the Computer History Museum's shindig tonight (April 26, 7pm PDT, see https://computerhistory.org/events/the-legendary-alto-and-research-at-the-edge) to hear from Butler Lampson, Alan Kay, Charles Simonyi, and others. I'd be there in person if I still lived in the valley.

Re: Companies Failing to Market and Profit from their Employees' Inventions

E-ink 'paper' is a completely different kettle of horses teeth.

Re: Need to cut them slack..RISC OS? Who?..

"I remember looking at it around 1990. RISC OS 2. It looked and acted like pretty much every other X- Windows based GUI floating around at the time in the US."

It really didn't. I was there too, doing UI research work in the UK (IBM UKSC and even at Martlesham!) and the US (ParcPlace! Interval Research! DEC WRL! HP labs!) and so on. Quite aside from anything else RISC OS was significantly faster than any X based UI, and was at least internally self-consistent - something none of the Xwindows systems seem to have mastered even today.

Re: Not for profit

Xerox made quite a bit of money from the invention of the laser printer. Even if you ignore the sales of actual printers, imagine the tonnage of toner and paper that resulted!

Re: Need to cut them slack

I don’t know what dipstick downvoted druck but seriously, he’s right. RISC OS was by far the best done GUI on any home machine for a very long time. All the current UIs could do with taking a long look at it.

Re: Need to cut them slack

The PARC GUI was originally implemented on custom computers like the Alto (and the Dorado, Dandelion, DandeTiger, etc) as a deliberate approach to seeing what could be possible with The Computer of The Future. They spent money to step 5 years into the future. So yes, expensive hardware originally in order to be able to do something advanced.

As for the code, well yes and no. It was, after all, Smalltalk. The time consuming part was working out what to do, since it hadn’t been done yet. The code for it was actually pretty simple. It had to be because there wasn’t much memory to play with on an Alto. IIRC it was 128kb including the screen memory. You can play with that original code at https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/ and see just how simple it was/is.

Of course these days a Raspberry Pi 4 can run Smalltalk around 20,000 times faster than an Alto and can have 64,000 times as much memory for a price equivalent to a diner lunch

The Stonehenge of PC design, Xerox Alto, appeared 50 years ago this month

I hope you’re on the Squeak mailing list!

Re: nope, Smalltalk80 was The Bomb..

“Java is C++ with all the crap thrown out. “

No. Just ... no. Primitive types? Seriously?

Re: Three mouse buttons!

Smalltalk was always select-menu-windowmenu until Windows got common enough to start warping people’s minds. So these days it tends to be select on main button, menu on secondary, window on tertiary or alt+secondary etc.

Fun bonus fact - I did the original port of Smalltalk to ARM (it was a launch day language for the Cpu) and had many discussions with the RISC OS team about mouse use & behaviour, menus, etc. I *still* make a living using Smalltalk on ARM.

Re: Smalltalk..the messaging killed it..

You do know that modern Smalltalks have all that and more in the debuggers, right? And the dynamic code generation is really pretty damn good at making things fast. It’s all moved on quite a bit since ‘76. PIC message sends are about the same speed as ‘normal ‘ procedure calls.

Re: "it's just old-fashioned Entity/Relationship with methods bolted on"

Given that the original Smalltalk was monochrome (outside a small number of experiments) your colour-blindness issue is implausible.

The UI is one of the great triumphs of Smalltalk. A decent integrated development system with a self reflective language that can debug itself, analyse itself, is far ahead of the tedious text edit, save file, run compiler, try to run result if there was any, run ugly annoying debugger, try to work out what to edit in what file, repeat until exhausted. Making a text only Smalltalk really doesn’t have much value if it loses the live nature of the system.

Re: Round corners!?!

Thing is, the Alto was running Smalltalk and so making the windows draw in any manner one wanted is pretty easy. It’s a matter of how much performance one has available and in 1972 there wasn’t so much. Not even on an Alto, which was perhaps 5 years ahead of the general state of things.

Later, on slightly faster machines we indeed implemented something you might recognise as rather like QuickDraw. Current Smalltalks do a wide variety of things- host windows working via host apis, BitBLT in a single window, web based displays, driving OpenGL or Cairo, etc. Sometimes all of them.

Re: Smalltalk

More than that - a function call is a jump to an address, an instruction known in advance by a typical compiler of dead-text languages. It says ‘go there and follow those instructions ‘. A message send is ‘please Mme. receiver, would you be so kind as to handle this request to find the letter sent to billg’. Depending on what the receiver is, anything might happen as a result- you might have a database dig out the letter, or a prank BOFH object set fire to your chair. The lookup of the action performed is dynamic - at least in a proper language- and that leads to being able to make dynamic environments like Smalltalk.

If your experience is limited to static languages with no live debugging and development then you are missing out on a substantial amount of joy.

If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now

Re: air CON

At one of the labs I worked at in Silicon Valley we had an a/c failure that resulted in almost indoor snow conditions for a few weeks. People in heavy coats, fan heaters aimed at feet, the works. Combined with 30C outdoors it made for some pretty unpleasant sniffles as the sudden temp changes every time we entered/exited upset noses. “Vasothermal rhinitis “ my doctor called it.

Plugging end-of-life EV batteries into the grid could ease renewables transition

Re: But they need recycling

Tesla bloated whale EV model 3 weighs about the same as the BMW svelte lightweight 3 series .

What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?

Re: Bad Memories

When I was an IBM Research Fellow I campaigned to get the developers to name the AIX window system “panes”, because obviously it was sensible and IBMish.

I juste wanted to know people had AIX and panes.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

Rented an early Subaru when in N’orlins for a conference. Drove off and eventually needed petrol. Couldn’t find how to open the damn flap.

Nice chap at garage called local dealer- “how do you fill up one o’them Subarus?” “That’s all right sir, it’s pre-installed at the factory.” Smartarse...turned out you pushed the same tiny lever you pulled to open the bonnet.

Re: Bad design

Quite a few motorcycles had those horrible rockers - mostly those awful “cruisers “. I disagree with your ‘nasty’ description. And gearshifts are not always on the left.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: StrongEd

Oh yeah, !StrongED FTW. So damn fast for searching, and combining it with !throwback.. brilliant . If you *have* to use Dead Text File systems then you need that.

Senior engineer reported to management for failing to fix a stapler

Wait, you have so many sheds you have keep them in racks?

Re: But I DO want to know!

Wow - my sympathies. Those must have been some dark parts.

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

Re: How does one secure it?

Oh, I dunno. That bridge in Crimea might be a good example of how the combination of ‘bomb’ and ‘thing next to bomb’ makes the problem much more interesting.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

What the flux lead you to that conclusion?

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

RISC OS is the only non-awful UI

I mean, c’mon, get with the program.

Re: System 7 - the horror, the horror.

Meh. Some of it was, kinda. I know (many of) the people on both sides of that. It’s more complicated.

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Re: Wow

Finally - someone that would understand why my main ARM powered machine is always named “GoldSkin”. I was mortified some years ago to have to spell it out to Larry Niven...

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

Re: Not going to happen

So do explain what happens when new housing developments are built, or new industrial developments? They need power; where does it come from? Could it possibly be that the same solution might allow for conversion to EV transport?

Re: America without V8's just isn't America

Congratulations- you managed to be wrong in almost every single sentence. That takes serious effort and dedication. Well done!

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

Re: Don't know if it's just that my coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

In my time in Silicon Valley I became familiar with the (fake) safety placard

The phrase “Hey y’all, watch this!” Is known to the state of California to be dangerous to your health

It was alarming how often it was applicable.

x86 Raspberry Pi Desktop is a great way to revive an old PC

Re: Free Math!

Well I don’t know about your little bubble universe but in mine the 64bit raspberry pi os has been in use for quite some time. Maybe if you spent some more time paying attention?

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

I still have one of the original prototype ‘silver fox’ machines. A whole 4Mb ram and a whopping! great! disk! of 20 whole Mb. It started out as an ARM1 machine and got upgraded by Acorn to ARM3 (woohoo! 4Kb cache!) and then 12MHz turbo mode.

Not a GNOME fan, and like the look of Windows? Try KDE Plasma or Cinnamon

Re: Similarly, if you have a touchscreen

Windows ever had a good UI, not ever. Mac is ‘Least Bad’ but still not good.

BOFH: Where do you think you are going with that toner cartridge?

Re: Printer Maintenance Contracts

Umm, you did notice that Brexit has given you back the priceless freedom to be shafted by scummy scammers, right?

A peek into Gigabyte's GPU Arm for AI, HPC shops

I’m with druck on this (hi druck!)

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

Re: "Thats odd"

Somebody else that remembers “The Crystal Sphere” by Brin?

We can bend the laws of physics for your super-yacht, but we can't break them

Re: Sat Comm

Only the one helicopter? Oh dear.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: Smalltalk-80

I had an early NS32032 machine ~1983, though I never got Smalltalk running on it (I wrote a very simple 3D interactive solid modeller on it, terrible performance).

On the other hand I had Smalltalk running on ARM before more than a couple hundred people knew about ARM. And ~25 years ago I was working on a Smalltalk medium-hard real-time OS on custom ARM hardware. It worked quite well, and was intended for a consumer network/media system that would have given us al the useful parts of IOT in the mid 90s. If only bill gates hadn’t stuck his foot in it...

Others have made Smalltalk sorta-OS systems too. So much nicer .

One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

PiHole helps save my sanity.

PiVPN.

An old model A in the garage runs a bunch of weather sensors and publishes MQTT to a broker. Another Pi runs a Smalltalk MQTT client I wrote and displays that data along with a fleet of other sensors around the estate.

Another runs a Smalltalk code repository.

Two Pi4s serve as main development machines, one for 32bit the other for 64bit, though the 32bit setup is really only for Scratch legacy support work for RPT. Several more live in PiTop ceed units for teaching.

Some are setup as MotionEye camera systems.

Another is an ISS backup of sorts.

I do have one or two in the cupboard, including an NIB Pi 2, but the others are damaged for one reason or another and are just in honourable retirement.

If I ever find time I want to play with Asterisk/IncrediblePBX, some home automation stuff to replace my current systems, a laser cutter, a CNC router, 3D printer etc. Lots of work left for Pis.

Re: How many?

Tell everyone you lack imagination and skill without actually saying...

Re: Where are they?

Google around and you can find several people making that sort of thing with CM4s.

For example - https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com//boards_cm.html

Re: Interesting.

Not really. It can help if you have it in a tight space, or you are heavily loading it all the time. My main Pi 4 is in a tight space and I do load it quite often and the PWM seems to fire up about once a week for a moment. Give them a decent PSU and attach an SSD (I use a geekworm x820 board) and they are very happy.

If you need more power, pay more money. Easy.