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jhallenworld

Re:Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads on Monday November 02, 2026 @07:53PM (#50346529)
A better comparison is probably AMD, since they also make server CPUs.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/

I figured the current owners of INTC stock are betting on the success of their fab business.. I think that's still to play out.

Likewise, Musk's Sieg Heil and association with Trump didn't help- instant ~25% drop in sales (60% in Europe).
As I age, reading has become a bit less enjoyable because I have to wear reading glasses (yes, I'm a baby). But I found that I really enjoy audio books- they give a different experience, it's very weird listening to books that I previously had read. One reason is that I read much faster than the audio book reading rate, and I find the slowness is a good thing- more time to experience and think I guess.
This is cool, but seriously I don't understand why you wouldn't just use Verilog (or VHDL) along with the wide number of associated tools available for it. It's trivially simple to create modules for TTL chips. Also you could design the schematic in KiCad and then export the netlist to Verilog for simulation. Verilog has VPI- a method to connect the simulation to external programs (C/C++), from which you could make a GUI for LEDs and switches. Once your design is in Verilog, you could compile it into C++ [Verilator], an FPGA or even an ASIC.

It's like choosing to use LabView for a large programming project (or IMHO, even a small project) instead of something like Python.

Re:Emacs Turns 50 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @05:47PM (#50281395)
I was lucky enough to have access to TOPS-20 at WPI in 1986 - 1988 (The DEC-20 was replaced with an Encore Multimax running UNIX as the student mainframe). TOPS-20 had a bunch of editors, I tried them all. I remember TVI, TECO and EDT, but I'm sure there were more. I already had experience with WordStar (C and assembly language programming on a PC) and various line editors, so although I used it, I never became an Emacs fanatic.

The most important software missing from the new Encore UNIX (Umax) was MM- the TOPS-20 integrated mail and bulletin board program. A friend of mine wrote "bboard" a campus messaging system as a replacement (this was soon replaced with USENET). It had a bad integrated editor, so I wrote my own editor as its replacement, this became the editor JOE. Even so, Emacs was always there as the counter-example. In those days, Emacs was large and slow and had a limited file size, and it was easy to do better if you weren't focused on extensibility.

I don't remember "not running", but I certainly do remember those annoying "garbage collecting... done." messages in C Emacs. The eventual solution from the mid 90s was kind of awesome: improve the garbage collector? No: Just stop showing the message.

I remember getting a DOS port of Gosling Emacs on floppy disk at a computer show (there was always somebody selling "shareware" at those). I lost that disk, and for a long time had no access to the Gosmacs source code, but eventually someone sent it to me. Sadly, we can not share it- James Gosling closed it. Some other Emacsen: MicroEmacs, Epsilon, JOVE and JED.

Amateur Radio predates the FCC- so I almost think it should be the reverse, none of this at the mercy of stuff. Of course government is the real coercive force- in Germany the Nazis revoked ham licenses, racially purified radio clubs and made the amateur radio operators work for them.
I listened to a net on a VHF repeater once- some guy's PTT button got stuck, which ties up the repeater, plus you hear the background sounds from his house. It was quite funny- FCC not needed, instead somebody called him (you heard his phone ring and him saying "What?!" over the repeater).
Re:Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran on Friday October 16, 2026 @10:33AM (#50118848)
Fortran was the most portable language before C, so people wrote compilers in it. Using Hollerith character constants.. and without strings..
The problem this can cause is that it could become the root identity for the effective social credit system. For example, if Uber bans you (it happens..), you might need a new phone number and email to get around it. At least you can get around it for now.
Re:Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @01:13PM (#50091149)
This doesn't work for all of their items- some have to go to a larger Amazon return location, and you must provide packaging. I'm not sure what triggers this.
Poe is awesome. If you're near Charleston, it's worth visiting Sullivan's Island- try to find the tree.

When Poe writes about murder, it's often first person point of view of the murderer- I find it more disturbing than later horror writers like HP Lovecraft or Steven King.

Re:ETH-68: Ethernet Audio Interface for Linux on Thursday October 08, 2026 @06:23PM (#50013246)
How does the receive side recover the transmit side's sample clock? There is a BNC for clock sharing between "multiple units", but I'm not sure if that's used / required between transmit and receive.

Or is there no such synchronization, in which case there would be long-term drift?

Re:The value of not getting to the point (2015) on Thursday October 08, 2026 @05:31PM (#50012623)
This is famously not a thing for Dutch people :-) There are definitely cultural differences.

This scene: John Adams meets the Dutch...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1cgBI5rdI

Re:How California Closed the Montana License Plate Loophole on Tuesday October 06, 2026 @02:49PM (#49982443)
I've seen car dealers in MA use Montana dealer plates. At the very least they are cheaper, avoids $220 / year excise tax and registration fees vs. $25 for Montana. I don't think it helps with any sales taxes- dealers don't have to pay when they buy cars, unlike customers. It would help if dealer uses the car personal reasons instead of just having it for resale.

Hmm... maybe I should start a car dealer just to avoid taxes on my next car..

The Montana plate for owners reminds of registering your boat in Wilmington Delaware to avoid state sales tax. You had to create an LLC to do this I think.

Re:cp: -r or -R? on Sunday October 04, 2026 @05:41PM (#49958191)
I never bothered to learn -C, instead I use:

    tar -cf - . | (cd <dest>;  tar -xf -)
For doing something like duplicating root of a filesystem you may want --one-file-system.
Re:Social Reality in China on Friday October 02, 2026 @10:18PM (#49940811)
Ah, I think the origin of this video style is "Zaza in China"- or at least he's the most successful at it.

https://www.youtube.com/@zazainchina

Re:Social Reality in China on Friday October 02, 2026 @04:32PM (#49938258)
Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.

Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).

Re:Social Reality in China on Friday October 02, 2026 @04:21PM (#49938136)
An interesting recent phenomena is that regular Chinese people have figured out how to use AI to speak for them to make english language youtube videos. They are quite fascinating to watch, because you don't normally get such an unfiltered perspective. I think people feel safe posting these because nobody knows them in the west, whereas family, friends and govt. see Chinese social media. And of course youtube is banned in China.. Some of them make a few hundred bucks from Alphabet, this is a big deal.

Here are a few (check out the comments- working class people from around the world make contact):

https://www.youtube.com/@kangkanginchina7

https://www.youtube.com/@Chineseruralareas

Anyway, I view this as one of the more positive uses for AI.

Re:NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @02:43PM (#49898365)
1 transistor for DTL... certainly CMOS is more relevant.
The Iranian revolution was due to messages spread on cassette tape. It's all Phillips's fault.
CB radio then.
"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"

This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.

Re:Z80 REPL on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @01:02PM (#49819160)
You should support symbols... For example, the monitor on my 6800 / 6809 Exorciser simulator has this (the "Offset at..." is printed when it fixes forward references):

    ~/exorsim$ exor -d
    % a 1000
    1000: start bra skip
    1002:  nop
    1003:  nop
    1004: skip ldx #10
    Offset at 1001 set to 02
    1007: loop dex
    1008:  nop
    1009:  bne loop
    100b:  rts
    100c: 
    % sy
    1007 loop
    1004 skip
    1000 start
    % u 1000
    1000: 20 02               BRA $1004
    1002: 01                  NOP
    1003: 01                  NOP
    1004: CE 00 0A            LDX #$000A
    1007: 09                  DEX
    1008: 01                  NOP
    1009: 26 FC               BNE $1007
    100B: 39                  RTS
What would be even better: "a" brings up a built-in mini-editor. When you exit, the code is assembled.

https://github.com/jhallen/exorsim

Re:What Sun got wrong on Monday September 21, 2026 @01:48PM (#49790703)
I seem to remember IBM had a way to buy their stuff online, but not anymore apparently. I'm sure this was back in the System x days.
Re:Lotus Notes and the dangers of starting from scratch on Wednesday September 09, 2026 @10:01AM (#49626763)
I had to use Notes after our company was acquired by IBM in 2005. As a startup, we used Thunderbird. What I remember was that finding things in Thunderbird was just so much faster because it had a filter feature (you enter a string, then instantly only the messages with that string would be shown). No such feature in Notes- I remember having a hard time finding messages, and that its search feature would miss things somehow.

Yeah, Notes had its shared database features, and you could see remnants of IBMers using them at the time, but most such applications been ported to Java CRUD apps. Also Lotus Sametime (it's like Slack) became a much more important collaboration tool.

Re:Altair Basic Interpreter Source Code (1975) [pdf] on Wednesday September 02, 2026 @08:08PM (#49544316)
I always thought that the floating point routines were the big feature that made Microsoft BASIC a thing (compared with both Radio Shack and Apple integer BASIC). It's interesting reading about Monte Davidoff and also that Gates knew they needed a specialist for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Davidoff

Re:Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:15PM (#49530961)
>an original 7104

I've got one, they are very cool. I also have a 7834 (storage tube), cool in a different way. On the other hand, they are taking up a lot of space... I also have two 485s, one with a broken trigger.

Re:Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @10:12PM (#49530946)
We've rented them in the past- always we're not quite sure we're done so keep them much longer than necessary. They're kind of a pain to pack and ship.
Re:Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @05:30PM (#49528520)
Yeah 1 GHz is nice, but that tiny 200 MHz Siglent is going to be much more useful in practice for most things.

Speaking of boat anchors, I'm trying to get my company to buy a DSA91304a (13 GHz scope with SERDES debugging). ~$44K with all the options, but still Windows-XP. The Windows-7 ones unfortunately don't have the options I want. Maybe there is a hack..

Re:OpenShot 4.0: Record, Edit, and Color Like Never Before on Monday August 31, 2026 @06:15PM (#49515500)
My goto has been Shotcut, it's main advantage is high resolution support without having to pay extra compared to something like Lightworks (which has a better UI for sure, but I'm not paying...).

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