heja2009

I worked with QNX 4 at uni and we built a robot system based on 2-4 networked 486/Pentium CPU cards in a rack with it [1]. We fully used the OS to make our robot system both hard real-time and completely network based using QNX's native capabilities. This gave me a deep understanding of those issues in my later career in robotics systems and I basically recreated - tediously - most of its features with UDP, TCP/IP and various IPC (inter process communication) features on vxWorks, SunOS and Linux.

One feature of the OS I fondly remember was that the most basic system calls (send/receive/reply) were implemented as about 3 inline assembler instructions each directly in the header file (qnx.h ?).

[1] https://herbert-janssen.de/paper/irini97-12.pdf

AND no dust, grime, etc. These tiny wheels get dirty and clog up pretty fast in human environments and then stop to work and need a good cleaning. Nice for demos but unsuitable for even normal research lab work. I hate them.

Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled due to safety concerns (liquid natrium is nasty, state government did not authorize operation), protests and significant doubts about its purpose (breeders are most suitable to produce bomb material and nuclear fuel).

Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.

1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.

Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience.

I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) comes to my mind first. Art contains and conveys truth.

Nietzsche's work is also a good example about why it's foolish to argue too much about what an author meant. He wasn't always clear in his thoughts - just like us all - and his thinking changed considerably anyway.

Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim?

Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population less than in later ages. Of course it is very difficult to give any numbers, but various infection diseases, childbirth and infant death were major causes of death. (E.g. women life expectancy overtook that of men only in the 19th century.) Also at least in the 13th and 14th century in Europe main reasons for a significant temporary population decline - during a time of general population growth - were black death and hunger, the latter being partially caused by limitations to agriculture technology and available land.

Athens-Sparta would be the Peloponnesian War, Punic wars were between Rome and Carthage. Sorry for the nitpick.

Hmm, but this is a very common problem particularly in history and archaeology and one that requires highly specialized expertise. Therefore almost always a modern unified calendar is used in new publications and the problem of dealing with historical dates as written is left to specialists. I don't think every article about per-modern events and events outside Gregorian-based calendar usage should mention that.

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then suggesting financial investment.

[1] https://www.michigan.gov/ag/consumer-protection/consumer-ale...

Interesting. I didn't notice the side notes at all because I immediately zoomed my view to only see the main text as I do with all web pages in this day and age.

best OS I ever had the pleasure to work with

To the contrary there is very good evidence that we pull arbitrary explanations whenever needed. See Gazzaniga's split brain experiments where people gave all sorts of reasons when asked why they did something and just could not know.

Since it is tidally locked around a low mass star, axial tilt should be near 0 and seasons should not exist [1]. Tidally locked also means much higher temperature than the estimated average (231K or -42C for the hotter one) on the sunny side and much lower ones on the dark side.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_tilt#Extrasolar_planets

Actually Apple had to find solutions to some of the problems you mention when they transitioned to OS X:

* multiple resource forks can be presented as files in a directory, the directory having the name of the multi-stream file and the files in it named after the stream, e.g. "resources"

* for transfering data to other mediums/computers etc you can use container formats such as zip or tar, but with the unpacker having the ability to unpack them properly to a multi-stream file

* since on modern systems such as windows you can seamlessly file-browse into container formats such as zip so this is even less of a problem

* actually OS X to this day uses something like this for "Apps" as they are a special container/directory that you can browse into when you know the magic incantation

C programming - luckily in my opinion - has a culture of very rigorous evaluation of programming techniques especially towards memory-unsafe programming, arguably the biggest weakness of C as a programming language.

This book uses gets() which is a function that can not be used safely. Any input that exceeds the buffer length will corrupt memory. The conventional wisdom in the C community is to NEVER use gets. I personally stopped reading in chapter 4 where this is done.

Unfortunately strictly avoiding memory issues is somewhat involved und thus often ignored in C beginner books. It is also hard to see unless you are pretty familiar with C's pitfalls. IMHO this is why this list of bad books is desperately needed.

Yes, it is even pretty much a design principle for newer board games [1]. It started to become popular with games like Settlers of Catan.

[1] https://boardgamedesigncourse.com/making-a-comeback/

Backpropagation was probably the most important step, but there was also the issue of workable training methods for many-layer networks. Fukushima did some very important - but rarely mentioned - work about this starting in 1979. He trained layer by layer, proceeding to the next only when the current stabilized. The main practical issue were the enormous training and execution times with the computers of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocognitron

that's the way some embedded control systems are designed. with some (many) errors (can't read/write) being fatal and shutting down the system after an alarm is sent.

Yes, it is derived from the saying.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabellumpistole

The programming language Occam, in its time the primary language to program Transputers, did not have operator precedence, so you had to use parentheses for anything. It was a huge pain, but probably still better than avoiding the edge cases of what you describe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam_(programming_language)

Completely agree, except I'd say physical electronic instruments have a lifetime of about 20-30 years now. Several synths I own are now non- or half-working because of fading displays, broken floppy drives, power supplies and even chips going bad. The relentless churn of music computer software and hardware setups has also existed since the 80s. I guess it is probably worse for photo & video production.

I worked in a big lab of about 100 engineer and scientists in the early 2000s. 2000-2005 more and more high-end SUN workstations were replaced by up-spec Linux machines. Only a handful of mostly CAD SUN workstations stayed.

Main reasons were the Linux and GNU development environment slowly overtook the Solaris one in convenience - in the end even the SUNs ran mostly gcc and the whole open source stack. Also getting drivers and (patch) installation was fairly easy for Linux and a major headache with Solaris.

The Apple II was hardwired to run on 60Hz AC and used a limited character set. Minimal hardware design has its downsides. In countries that run 50Hz AC games and other real-time software ran slower or had wrong timing. I noticed quite a number of Apple IIs in Germany being used in engineering or with measurement equipment because of the expansion slots. But software had to be modified to cope for the 50Hz.

She gives very good advice for us non-designers though use color templates. They are available as book or webpage and by trying out just a handful that seem to fit your needs you can quickly get to a reasonably good design. It works for me at least.

https://blog.datawrapper.de/colorguide/

Well, for rooms with actual tatami mats, you are not really interested in the area, but rather how many mats will fit. Thus, a 24m^2 (12 mat) room with the wrong aspect ratio will not fit 12 mats. (I'm using the 1 mat = 2m^2 conversion for convenience and I actually use 2m^2 mats in my tatami room.) Practically, mat sizes can vary a bit and can be custom sized. [1]

Even though today only a minority of apartment rooms are actually used with tatami it is still customary to give all rooms in mat units and usually in m^2 too.

BTW that's similar to how non SI units are still used in other countries nowadays, e.g. (metric) pounds and half-pounds are still used in context of groceries in colloquial German.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatami#size

I think for Windows Mobile, their persistence and slowness made them fail. They kept trying to improve Windows CE based systems (not going to list all the renames) which were a very poor base to build on. When they finally decided to switch to a new OS/GUI they were slow and managed it badly. When it came out and they had good hardware as well they were way too late.

You need to create a makefile to tell make what to do.

Nope. You can say "make hello" and have make automatically use its default rules - which can be configured - to e.g. compile hello.c into a hello executable. I use this frequently.

How did Wagner justify his music in philosophical terms? Why did he even feel the need to justify it? What would such a justification look like? What would a competent justification look like? How can I identify a composer who has philosophical gifts?

Wagner (and most other composers) were highly influenced by their contemporary philosophy. The wikipedia article lists a lot of this and Wagner is a very good example for this as he had rather intense and highly influential conversations with philosophers: many books have been written about Wagner and Nietsche's relationship alone. Wagner also changed his ideas (and consequently his music) over time, most prominently embracing first germanic mythology and later christianity.

About the "competence" and "half-bakedness" of musical theories held by composers over the time you can probably entertain many prolonged spirited conversations. Personally - having read some classical and pre-classical aera musical theory books - I think you can find excellence and mediocracy distributed rather equally over the centuries.

And yes, this piece seems to expect the reader to know a bit about music history, especially that of musical theory.

Japan after ~1900 very much flip-flopped in their policy between playing the anti-imperialist liberator of Asia and its first colonial power and equal to western colonial powers for some time. Of course there was a political power struggle within Japan about this direction. Defining moment was the victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, which was the first victory of a "3rd world" country against a traditional colonial power.

Likewise they partially treated Koreans as lost brothers that needed to be elevated and integrated into their empire and an inferior race that was to be exploited colonial style. Note that even the "integration" strategy showed some similarity to what the Nazis later (after 1938) did with their "Heim ins Reich" strategy (which included "reintegration" of ethnic Germans on foreign soil by territorial annexation).

In practical terms both policies were put into measures sometimes simultaneously, but the colonialism supporters grew stronger over time. The famous "Greater Asian Welfare Sphere" rhetoric was a perverted remains of the "liberator"-style agenda. (I read a history book on the topic many years ago, but unfortunately can't find a reference, sorry.)

Whether the Japanese empire of the time should be classified as fascist seems to be at least highly controversial among historians. I had the impression the majority see it as a nationalistic (and after the putsch 1936 also military) dictatorship.

To clarify: I have no problem donating to fight for civil rights in the US. I know they affect me and there is not much else I can do as a European to change US policy. I do have a problem though with framing the debate as "privacy for the American people", that may be a good cause, but it is a domestic cause. I'd much prefer if this were framed as a global one. (And I'm sure Lavabit had international customers.)

Only the American people?