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OnlyMortal

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You’re quite clearly wrong.

You write code to fit the immediate business need and that shifts rapidly over a year or two.

If you do otherwise, you’re wasting your time and the money of the enterprise you work for.

You cannot see the future however smart you might be.

All code is legacy. Business needs shift.

The likes of Copilot are ok at boiler-plate if it has an example or two to follow. It’s utterly useless at solving problems though.

Heh. I worked on the Mac version of ViaVoice. I joined as I was already an expert in AppKit and Obj-C.

We were given old Macs running Classic to run Notes so we had two computers. One being MacOSX. Notes was the biggest pile of crap I’ve ever had to use. With one exception…

On the OSX box we were happily running svn until we were forced to use some IBM command-line system for source control. To add insult to injury, the server was in Texas and we were in Boca Raton (old PC factory as it happens). The network was slow.

It had so many command-line options a guy wrote a TCL for it.

Adding to that was the local IBM lan was token ring and we were Ethernet. That was fun.

Hyperspace 1 year ago

That’s very interesting. Typically a Rabin fingerprint is used to identify identical chunks of data.

Identifying similar blocks and, maybe sub-rechunking isn’t something I’ve ever considered.

:-) I worked in the first OSX version. I did the AppKit UI being one of the few on the planet who had a NeXT background.

It came with a UK language model as the US model didn’t recognise my accent.

In a car they’re a distraction from driving. You have to look at the iPad stuck to the dash and not on the road - where the driver’s focus must be.

With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.

This must make it safer to drive.

As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.

Interesting. We went through a similar process and ended up with Yugabyte to deal with the locks (cluster).

It’s based on Postgres but performance was not good enough.

We’re now moving to RDMA.

I used to crack C64 disk games. They were mostly trivial because I wrote a disk sector editor that would disassemble blocks on demand.

One that comes to mind were Ocean’s copy protection that was hacked by a load of 1 into the accumulator and a return. They had a “bool IsValidDisk()” type of routine.

After cracking one of their games I could crack others in less than 2 minutes directly on a copied floppy.

Pascal was a first class citizen. Indeed, quite alot of the original Mac was Pascal and 68k assembler. For example, strings were prefixed with a length byte as is popular in the Pascal world.

Apple even shipped a Pascal compiler with their MPW Shell - a development environment.

Personally, I used MPW C and 68k.

Users don’t understand your app as it’s not been built using workflows an end user follows.

As for code not being understandable, that’s just poor coding in a team.