Comment Re:chicken or egg? (Score 1) 269
Next time you run mingw stay alert for the "'login' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file" warnings during compilation.
at least from when he started coding school systems to put him into classes with more girls
That is more "fucking awsome" than "bastard", even if today it would get his ass raped in some federal prison.
I'd say coding a BASIC interpreter in 4kb using paper and an emulator you hacked up for an unreleased platform is pretty cool as well.
Then he started hearing calls from the dark side and the rest is History.
All in all, I think he is an admirable man if only in the same category as Genghis Khan - who also did a lot genetic health related work for Eurasian people.
A 3D T-Rex chased people around on ZX-81s with 1024 bytes of RAM two years before Elite was published.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze
To be fair, that doesn't counter his argument, amd64 has more registers than i386 and they do make a big difference. Repeat the tests with 32-bit pointers and 64 bit registers and then get back to us.
As of today, the method he mentions would probably provide a bit better performance, assuming the processor optimizations didn't break when their expectations weren't met.
However, I think it is very short-sighted to miss the fact that about the only thing increasing these days is memory and that apps tend to grab all the address space they can get. By 2050 I can see machines with 1TB ram, but I can't see apps keeping themselves under 0xFFFFFFFF.
Furthermore, thanks to ASLR, which is a feature available now on most OSes, address space fragmentation is a problem today even for programs well under the 4Gb mark. The future is 64:64. 32 bit architectures are already dead, they just haven't realized it yet.
If Neanderthals and Humans could interbreed I'd say we both were subspecies of our common ancestor. I can't see how can they be a subspecies of us when we didn't exist yet. So either rename homo rhodesiensis to homo sapiens, or hss and hn to homo rhodesiensis sapiens and homo rhodesiensis neanderthalensis respectively.
In any case, make it a cheap computer. I don't think the ipad would work for a toddler.
I used the "adult" version of the ZX Spectrum 48k when I was ~18 months old. I even learned enough SINCLAIR BASIC to LOAD ""
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.