Ask me how it ends™
I’ve published my Lisa filesystem access tool: https://github.com/eschaton/lisafs It lets you list and extract the files in a Lisa filesystem, with automatic text file conversion. It supports both the flat Lisa OS 2.0 and the hierarchical Lisa OS 3.0 filesystems. Right now it only works with Disk Copy 4.2 disk images but should be straightforward
Hey, remember when structures on fire had to be insured by specific fire companies to actually be protected against just being allowed to burn uncontrollably? We realized the enormous cost of that to society and eliminated that form of fire insurance entirely, and established municipal fire departments.1 I’m sure at the time there was much
On the SIMH group, Al Kossow and others have been discussing how .tap is a terrible archival container format that also has a bunch of problems for use in emulation and simulation of systems. This is a problem I ve been thinking about for a while since I hired Miëtek to implement SCSI tape support in
In a vintage computing group, someone posted a picture of a terminal in use at a modern bookstore that’s still using the same infrastructure as they have for decades, and someone replied saying that while from a retrocomputing perspective it was cool, as a business they need to “modernize!” This was my reply… It s my
In a world driven by profit and power, a brilliant young programmer named Maya had a vision that defied convention. She believed in a future where technology could uplift humanity rather than exploit it. With a heart full of ideals, she embarked on a journey to create an artificial intelligence system that she named the
Nancy Pelosi, a while back, claimed that “America needs a strong Republican Party.” What would compel her to say that, when the Republican Party thinks she should be jailed or executed for thoughtcrime? It turns out that, mathematically, our first-past-the-post system is essentially guaranteed to devolve to two major parties fighting for control. So what
So yesterday, Thomas Fuchs said on Mastodon: The LLM thing and people believing it will replace people reminds me so much of the “visual programming” hype in the 80s/90s, when companies promised that everyone could write complex applications with a few clicks and drawing on the screen. Turns out, no, you can’t. I had to
We don’t have a movement, but if you neutrally ask Americans their opinions on a variety of topics, a very significant number of us would prefer the far left if we at all thought it was feasible to pursue. Look no further than the popularity of Star Trek, or as some like to call it,
Did Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito commit tax fraud? I assume that in addition to knowingly not including the very valuable “gifts” from their “friends” in their financial disclosures, they also knowingly didn’t pay federal or state taxes on them. Politicians, judges, and other high-level public servants should be audited annually and, if more than
I read something tonight about how some telecom lobbies were sending automated “public comments” to regulators as if they were actual individuals represented by the government the regulatory agencies belonged to, and are starting to switch to LLM-generated text to try to evade detection. How is that not fraud? (Wire fraud if electronic, mail fraud
Here’s another interesting thing I’ve learned about Clascal and Object Pascal: It went through exactly the same evolution from combining object allocation initialization to separating them that Objective-C did a decade later! In early 1983 Clascal, classes were expected to implement a New method as a function returning that type, taking zero or more
On January 19, Apple and the Computer History Museum released the source code to the Lisa Office System 7/7 version 3.1, including both the complete Office System application suite and the Lisa operating system. (The main components not released were the Workshop environment and its tooling, including the Edit application and the Pascal, COBOL, BASIC,
One of the annoying things about Mastodon is that it s tough to share Mastodon links and have them open in your favorite app instead of in a web browser. This is due to the lack of a shared scheme or a shared server—which makes sense for a distributed/federated system, but doesn t help its usability. One
Web pages should be blazing fast on *25 year old* machines, modulo a little lag from more serious crypto. Like, I should be able to build *1998 Mozilla* against a modern SSL stack on my Silicon Graphics O2, and browsing the web should be nearly as fast as it was using Netscape Navigator 4 on
jorm: it s so clear to me that all the bullshit of the past 8 years was stoked so that we d be too divided to enter this fight I mean, I think everything. I think Brexit, Gamergate, Q-Anon. In the end all of this feels like the weaponization of exploits in both our general and specific
So, the Federation is “fully automated luxury space communism.” Of course there are people who just hang out and don’t contribute, but that’s OK! They don’t need to! But what do you do with the people who do need to? There are people who use the fact that they’re in a post-scarcity society to research,
Instead of ballot propositions for bullshit like splitting up the state, California really needs a ballot proposition implementing universal healthcare and seizing the existing health care infrastructure for the people. Treating health care as a for-profit business is a crime against humanity.
Italian author Umberto Eco defined “Ur-Fascism” in an article in the New York Review of Books in June, 1995. It can be distilled into fourteen points. It’s worth taking a look at these to see just what our society is dealing with when it comes to “alt-right” Neo-Nazis and the ideology they promote. Thanks to
Today is my twelfth anniversary in Developer Tools at Apple! Still love it, too!
A couple weeks back, I tweeted the following: Turns out a Raspberry Pi now is about 6 times as fast as a SPARCstation 20 was 20 years ago. And a Pi 2 is more like 15 times as fast. I was a little low in my numbers, too — they’re more like 7 times and
For hacking/prototyping/fun purposes I have a few embedded systems laying around. For example, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi systems, one of the original Raspberry Pi model B boards and one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B boards. And on everything, I have the latest Steel Bank Common Lisp building. On my
Cupertino is at one edge of the Santa Clara Valley, one of the best places on the continent to grow fruit. This display is in our Whole Foods, one of the (if not the) largest stores they have. All of the brands are local and don t exist any more, because we paved them over in
I ve had my car for 10 years, and my odometer rolled over 100,000 miles earlier today. Time to start thinking about a new car! Maybe a Tesla Model S, in a couple of years
Mac OS X has a number of concurrency mechanisms, and that increases with Snow Leopard. In addition to run loops, threads (both Cocoa and POSIX) and operations, Snow Leopard adds **Grand Central Dispatch** (GCD), a very lightweight way to represent units of work and the style of concurrency they need, and have the system figure
Last week, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released! Snow Leopard represents a lot of hard work by a lot of folks at Apple and at seeded third-party developers, and it really shows. Now that it s shipped, I can actually talk about some of the especially cool things this release has for developers.