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onre

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This is equal parts brilliant and demented. Thank you.

  syöte olkoon vakiosyöte

  yritä
    tee syötteen kullekin alkiolle:
      käsittele(alkio)
  paitsi poikkeustilanteessa liukulukuylivuoto:
    kirjoita(virhetulosteeseen, "liukulukuylivuoto")
  muutoin:
    kirjoita(virhetulosteeseen, "odottamaton poikkeus")

Intake and exhaust manifold shapes affect the power and torque characteristics of the engine. Also, these are not cheap parts. Also a quick glance at the parts catalogue suggests that the example engine, BMW B48, has different pistons and connecting rods for different tune levels, suggesting that the cast engine block is one of the few components which are actually interchangeable between the versions. Didn't check, but I'd guess the turbocharger compressor and turbine wheels might be different, too.

As a Northern European (Finland) I can tell you that the electricity cost here for last year was closer to 0,1 € per kWh including the transfer fee and taxes. Additionally, more than 40 % of houses here have electric heating. The heating season starts in early autumn and ends in late spring, lasting 8 to 9 months depending on the year. As the electricity used by the device is turned into heat, during the heating season running it costs nothing.

I would most likely end up with something like this:

  CAT          CATalogue - output the contents of current directory
  RM           to Raster Memory - load contents of named file in framebuffer
  MV           Make Virtual - map the file into memory and output the address
  LS           Load System - attempt to reboot using the named file as the kernel
  CD           Create Directory - self-explanatory
  SH           System Halt - immediately stop all processing
...and so on.

Thanks, I always mix up mold and mildew. However, "arpa" is specifically a lottery ticket, whereas there are tickets for concerts, tickets to ride, tickets in Jira etc...

I have to say, .home.arpa doesn't exactly roll of the tongue like .internal.

In my native language (Finnish) it's even worse, or better, depending on personal preference - it translates directly to .mildew.lottery-ticket.

I remember borrowing a book from the library, which had a type-in checksum program of this sort. It was done like was common for C=64 things of this kind - there's a BASIC FOR-loop iterating through a memory area, reading in bytes from DATA statements you've typed in and POKEing those bytes into memory, not completely unlike entering a program manually from the front-panel switches of an older computer.

So, after typing that in and probably SYSing (C=64 BASIC command for executing machine code from arbitrary memory location) to some address, it did print out a two-digit (eight-bit) hex checksum after every BASIC line I entered on the C=64 and the program listing in the book had the correct checksums for every line, so spotting errors was more or less instantaneous.

This stuff brings memories.

  FOR I=40960 TO 49152:POKE I,PEEK(I):NEXT I
  POKE 1,54
From top of my head; loop through the BASIC interpreter area, reading byte by byte with PEEK and POKEing those bytes back to the same addresses. Sounds nonsensical? Not so, because the C=64 does have full 64 kB of RAM, but some of it is overlapped by ROMs. What happens here is that you're reading from ROM but writes always go to RAM, so you're copying the BASIC interpreter from ROM to RAM. After that, the POKE statement turns off the ROM overlap and the interpreter is now run from RAM, so you can edit it live - and obviously cause all sorts of interesting crash situations.

It sure did help later with career in IT to have understood this kind of stuff at age of around ten.

Hacker Laws 1 year ago

I feel this is a side-effect of so many people getting "simple" wrong, as in, calling things simple because they superficially seem so, even while being aware of but ignoring the underlying complexities.

A no-frills X toolkit. Think Athena, add things like dialogs, file picker and make it completely vectored. No antialiasing, top goal is small size and fast execution. Can display vector and bitmap fonts, only external dependency is xcb. I just recently got my first digital storage oscilloscope and begun writing a companion software for it, as I couldn't find anything usable. This is one of the offshoots of that, the other being a somewhat Postscript-like language for scripting the thing.

Once I get this done, I get back to the actual project of a 2.11-BSD based handheld computing appliance.

Also there is this thing called "day job".

Does not reflect my experience at all. T420 from 2011 is still completely usable. Haven't clocked the boot-up time but definitely not minutes, more like a couple dozen seconds. Everything worked out of box with latest stable Debian. Can do 2560x1600 over the DP connector, too. This is not even a top-spec model but the slowest i5 available back then.

I've gotten an OS to run on a new platform with a debugging tool portfolio consisting of a handful of LEDs and a pushbutton. After getting to the point where I could printf() to the console felt like more than anyone could ever ask for.

Anecdote aside, it certainly doesn't hurt to be able to debug things without a debugger if it comes to that.

I have the 122-key version and a ton of Emacs bindings to make the most out of the 24 function keys and the 12-key panel on the left. It is simply the best.

Dunno how this is supposed to be worded, but it's because the "pointerhood" is tied to the variable being declared, not the type itself. This becomes obvious when you declare multiple variables at once.

  char* cat, dog;  /* one char pointer, one char */
  char *cat, *dog; /* two char pointers */

Almost all old rangefinders were quiet, ditto for folders and TLRs - it wasn't in any way Leica specific. SLRs, on the other hand, can be rather noisy because of the mirror slap. Pentax 67 sounds almost like a weapon.

Not true, neither of the founders died in a car accident.

Volvo had a very strong safety emphasis already in the '50s, introducing many firsts in the automotive safety field. In that decade they introduced shoulder belts as a world first and padded dashboard as an European first (Tucker had this already in '40s but only 51 cars were ever made).

"Another change since the original OSes were initially being built is the need for security"

I do not know what's referred to as "original OSes" but many old operating systems had actually pretty decent security architecture. MULTICS and VMS, for example, and many others too.

Back in late '90s a friend lived in a student dorm which had a then-fast 512 kbps Internet connection. It was heavily firewalled - UDP only to ISP's nameservers, TCP only to ISP's web proxies. ICMP was passed anywhere, though, so he wrote a small program which encapsulated a TCP stream in ICMP "host unreachable" reply packets, IIRC. The other end of the tunnel ran on a machine at the place where he was interning as a junior programmer. Debugging the program was slightly painful because he couldn't obviously be at both ends of the tunnel simultaneously, but he got it to work in a couple of weeks. It wasn't very tolerant of packet loss - IIRC it didn't have any mechanism to resynchronize the connection if there was any, but instead there was some method of reinitializing the connection. Anyway, running SOCKS on top of all this made the ISP-crippled connection usable in a normal manner.