unwiredben

I got to hang with him a little in the early 2010s when I was doing JavaScript work and found him nice and personable. I'm so sorry for his early passing.

I was at Palm when the iPhone launched, and one note from this analysis summed up Apple's new power in the market and how they really changed the landscape.

"Cingular has allowed Apple to launch a device with WLAN and inbuilt services"

At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience. We certainly would have loved to have launched Palm Treo phones with WiFi radios, but our carrier partners wanted the only way to get data in and out of the devices to be through their monetized data plans. They also wanted to control what you did with that data so they could charge for their own email or messaging systems or web portals. The same applied to app stores. Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.

Palm did benefit from the iPhone launch -- it had us uplevel our efforts away from the post-Palm OS phones that we were in the middle of developing that were aimed at the RIM market and instead try something radical with webOS, and when the Pre launched, it actually had WiFi on board, although the Sprint-exclusive Pixi phone lacked WiFi due to carrier request. There was some momentum there for a while, but then HP bought us, hit its own set of brick walls with carriers, and ditched the hardware business shortly after Apple started launching on other carriers.

and also its Voja4, not Voya (my mistake in remembering name spellings)

At Hackaday Supercon in 2002, the badge for attendees (https://hackaday.com/2022/10/12/the-2022-supercon-badge-is-a...) implemented a fictional 4-bit CPU along with control panel for directly entering instructions and running and stepping through code. I had a huge amount of fun implementing a space shooter video game on it, as the panel included a bit-by-bit view of one of its pages of memory. Comparing its Voya4 architecture with the 4004 was fascinating. Some similar tradeoffs, but the Voya4 has the benefit of 50 years of CPU instruction set exposure.

Alas, dimitygr's method wouldn't work on the badge, as the memory and RAM are all internal to the PIC24 that implements the CPU emulator.

BTW, 4-bit CPUs are still made and used. Many of the mass-produced IR remotes are programmed using a 4-bit MCU. See https://www.emmicroelectronic.com/sites/default/files/produc... for a datasheet.

That's often a recently launched StarLink formation -- the bunch up in a line when deployed, and have to be maneuvered over several weeks to spread out and take different orbits.

a visit to the research reactor in Hamilton, Canada

I grew up reading his "Ask the Guru" columns in Computer Shopper and loves all the creative ways he came up to use PostScript. His hardware hacker articles were also great. He will be missed.

Jerry Pournelle isn't up to much anymore, as he died in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

I've got USB-powered desk fans at home and the office. I've tried a fair number, and typically get ones that have a couple of different speed settings and good bearing that are mostly silent.

As soon as it prompted for number, I was out of there. Kinda reminded me of the Dianetics commercials, though.

Cobalt is the primary engine that's used for running YouTube and YouTube TV on set-top boxes and smart TVs. If you notice that it looks the same on a Roku device or a Fire TV stick or a Samsung TV, that's because all of those are running a port of Cobalt and a special version of the YouTube website.

Effectively an ATM-style interface?

The CPU isn't the only user of power. The CPU may be 20% more efficient, but the screen and radio probably aren't.

Here in Austin, Texas, there's a cooperatively-owned software development and design business called Vulk Coop. They've hosted a series of meetups and happy hours for people to talk about the co-op model and how it relates. However, it's not anti-capitalistic, just worked-owned. Details at https://vulk.coop/ and https://www.meetup.com/Austin-Software-Co-operatives/

I worked at Palm during the development of webOS, both before the Pre was launched, then again in developer relations and framework development after it came out. I'm very happy to see this archive of the great work the community created around these devices.

If you want to archive my old Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/webostips, that might be useful for the help section. It really only ran in 2009-2010, as I got too busy after returning to Palm from my stint at Mozilla.

It was coming... the WindsorNot design was just a slab with no keyboard, IIRC. https://www.webosnation.com/windsornot-webos-slate-smartphon...

If you like this, check out the 4am collection on archive.org (https://archive.org/details/apple_ii_library_4am) - the Apple II hacker posts detailed logs of their cracking techniques for each title. Here's an example of the crack note for Datasoft's Pac-Man port (https://ia600508.us.archive.org/20/items/PacManDatasoft4amCr...)

I looked at several logos and saw that they were missing the registered trademark or trademark symbols. Those shouldn't be removed when making the vector versions, as they're part of the logo.

From what I've seen, the tiny Palm Phone (from TCL) didn't do very well, but there's still some inventory on Amazon: https://palm.com/pages/product.

There's also the Cyrcle Phone (https://www.cyrclephone.com/) which doesn't seem to be for sale anymore after its Kickstarter and Indie Go Go campaigns.

Also in play is that some parties have patents on certain kinds of control systems using CEC, so just implementing something that seems useful can get a device manufacturer in legal trouble :(

For 6502 fans, there's a new port of Clang and LLVM that seems to be doing some nice code generation. See https://llvm-mos.org/

I think that might be derived from The "#pragma mark" feature that was in the CodeWarrior IDE which could be used to have annotations show in the drop-down list of functions in the code editor

It's worth noting this is from May 2021 and Roku had already patched the vulnerabilities before this article went public.

Taylor is just north of Round Rock, so part of the greater Austin area. It's pretty close to the current Samsung facility. I don't think this is East Texas jurisdiction.

I remember using lots of T classes back in the early 90s when I was building software using Turbo Vision, a text user-interface framework bundled with Borland C++ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision)

The east part of Austin where Tesla is located is still underpopulated compared to most of Travis county, so there's room for a lot of housing to be built out that way. Connectivity from there to central Austin isn't too bad, since that's the direction of the airport and Houston.

FM audio on yoru phone usually relied on the headphone cable being used as an antenna to receive the FM signal. With the demise of wired headphones, especially for high-end phones, this is unlikely to be viable.

I've got a LimeSDR Mini. I mainly use it as an ATSC 1.0 signal generator from time to time for testing TV tuner code at work, and it does a good job, as long as I'm running it on a PC with a high-bandwidth USB 3.0 port. I've had issues going through hubs.

Atari shipped a final Rev C basic both in the ROMs for the XE computers and on cartridges for people that requested it.

There were several derivations. The original authors of Atari Basic produced BASIC XL and BASIC XE on cartridge, each with additional language features. There's also the really cool Altirra BASIC (see https://virtualdub.org/downloads/Altirra%20BASIC%20Reference...) which ships with the Altirra emulator as a tokenized-code compatible, but faster and more featureful, implementation. A version of that was included in the ROM for the new 576NUC+ all-in-one Atari-compatible.

I'm surprised that there aren't more aliases: "take" didn't work, but "get" did, for example. Picking the right word from a description was odd, "get sharp sword" didn't work, but "get sword" did.