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Journal Journal: 30 years on the net

Well, that escalated quickly. Or not so quickly. Looking at my post from 20 years ago, if you had told me just how much shittier the Internet would become, I wouldn't have believed you. There's a proverb that the web mainly consists of five websites, each full of screenshots and reposts of the other four, and it's not far from the truth. Social media brought us a social web usable by anyone, just as we imagined it in the 90's, but it didn't bring the democratization of knowledge, the social s

Comment We've already had it, more or less (Score 1) 82

For quite some time now, various source versions had already been available by leaks. An 8080 Altair version (4K?), an early generic 6502 8K version, a CP/M 5.x version, and an 8086 version. And the labels from the 6502 version apply very well to a disassembly of early 6800 8K versions for Altair 680 and SWTPC, though the 5-byte float support needs to be reconstructed.

Admittedly they were all a bit lacking in that they only hint at the original PDP-10 macro-fied version, which this release seems to be. And this still doesn't fulfill my quest for a clean 68000 version with binary math routines aside from the horribly segmented Mac OS version that's full of all sorts of new-age post-5.x stuff. (There's a 5.x decimal-math version for Tandy 6000 Xenix, but I never found a binary-math Xenix version.) But I'll be happy to look at what this version brings to the whole collection of MS-BASIC source code.

This all has meaning to me because I started on a TRS-80, and I was always disassembling its BASIC, followed by looks inside 6809 and 68000 versions. It's been fun trying to trace the ancestry of all the various bits of it. I sometimes say that I learned assembly language from Bill Gates because I learned so much from the code for BASIC. And I've actually been using this knowledge lately with a project to build a computer around a 68HC11 CPU. It's very convenient to be able to re-assemble it as necessary.

Comment Re:Not the point (Score 1) 161

The journalist was clearly invited along for Sportsmanship reasons. The Houthis have trouble shooting down F-18s, so they were supposed to be alerted when was the right time for SAM/AAA to be at maximum readiness.

Alas, though the Atlantic was told a couple hours beforehand, they didn't publish the details until days later!

If we want to give the Houthis a credible handicap, so that they have a legit chance to kill US airmen, we need to invite faster news organizations.

Getting the info to Russia in realtime was potentially helpful, but you can't count on Russian media to be as fast as our western media, so I say "too little, too late" to that Republican strategy.

Comment Re:Missing the real costs (Score 3, Informative) 44

You cannot lose a patent by failing to defend it; that's something from trademark law.

Yeah, if anything, abstaining from defending a patent and keeping a low profile, can make it worth more. If you can get other people to use your patent in a standard or something else widespread, then you're set. Wait until it's well-adopted commercially, then surface the submarine and start firing torpedoes.

Comment Re: Cybersquatting (Score 1) 47

f you have a script that queries on every word in the dictionary but a human enters the last letter of every word is that enough human input to qualify as 'created by a human'?

Maybe.

A lot of people take Jackson Pollock very seriously as an artist. But with some of his art, it sure looks like he just randomly (i.e. arbitrarily, as in your example) splattered stuff around. It's either over my head, or below my willingness to acknowledge. (I'm not here to talk shit about the guy, but I'll admit I never "got it.") If that's art, why not "The G series" by Fluffernutter? (Where the artist typed the letter "G" after 8 consecutive words in the middle of the dictionary, and then the computer used the resulting "words" as input to a hash function whose output was fed to the PRNG of a drawbot.)

I really wish you had collaborated with me, though, because I think I had a more creative hash function than the one you used.

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