News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lepicz

Re:Os8088: A powerful Mac-like OS for the IBM XT, 286, 386 on Sunday August 09, 2026 @01:04AM (#49228593)
when i'm feeling blue i go read and toy with geoworks source.. it's kinda weird to read TODOs from 1900 :)

and one wonders what could have been if there were not incompetency of microsoft etc..

Re:I Hate (Most) Keyboard 'Fn' Keys on Wednesday June 10, 2026 @10:50AM (#48477203)
depends on artillery.. i mean canon:

F5 is for save game

F9 is load :)

Re:C++: The Documentary on Friday June 05, 2026 @02:38PM (#48416478)
hmm, yes it's interesting but honestly - not much of the stuff is usable IRL

the only thing i was regularly using (Loki library) for was the assoc_vector

Re:C constructs that still don't work in C++ on Monday May 25, 2026 @05:32AM (#48265001)
this compatibility sucks sometimes.

for example you want to add nice feature to c++ with nice syntax, but there is a similar syntax somewhere in C that nobody uses, but you have to support it. you end up with nice feature with horrible syntax.

Re:Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port on Saturday April 25, 2026 @08:08AM (#47900792)
> It's a magical feeling.

hehe working with this TV library scratches my nostalgia itch :D

it probably saved me from futile efforts like writing apps for GEOS or joining the one person Hurd team.

Re:Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port on Saturday April 25, 2026 @07:20AM (#47900538)
i mean: for example you have a problem 'how do i create scrollbars two squares wide' (not a real problem, can't think of something now)

if you work with qt for example so these days you ask google/stackoverflow/qtforum and you have multitude of responses if it's a common problem and sometimes you have whole solutions ready to copy&paste.

when you work with TV and ask google - you usually get... not much. so you have to take the longer route: study the doc/books (you mentioned), study the code, examples... or be friend with the author of this library or those two or three people who actively use this library these days ;)

-- edit: btw those books (there's a c++ one as well) you mention are good, but, sadly, no book is detailed enough when you have very specific problem :)

Re:Turbo Vision 2.0 – a modern port on Saturday April 25, 2026 @01:20AM (#47898872)
it is still very well usable - i used TV 2.0 year ago to do some prototype. i wanted (and mostly succeeded) to create turbovision front end for LLDB debugger... you know, that would behave like Borland's Turbo Debugger.

few quick notes:

- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.

- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.

- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.

- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy

- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement

- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)

overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.

i gave up on stacking - no matter what i do, i get passive-aggressive comments from my wife

'raccoon on cocaine' she calls it :)

Re:Play Aardwolf MUD on Thursday January 08, 2026 @09:51AM (#46541687)
MUDs were the fentanyl of university students :D
cool, i was looking for something like this to try on my own puny hw - thanks!
Re:Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z on Monday December 01, 2025 @03:46AM (#46105029)
'We have D at home' :)

c:\> subst d: c:

Re:Windows drive letters are not limited to A-Z on Sunday November 30, 2025 @12:29PM (#46098613)
Stacker compressed volume ;)
LOL :D somebody has high opinion about himself
Re:When did people favor composition over inheritance? on Sunday November 16, 2025 @01:08AM (#45943144)
heh, i have seen programmers using virtual everywhere, because they were lazy to use declspec(dll_export) on windows system :)
Re:Why do we need dithering? on Friday November 14, 2025 @06:14AM (#45925779)
mafia2 used that as well (at least for cars appearing into your bubble)
Re:Iceland just found its first mosquitoes on Friday October 24, 2025 @02:33PM (#45697681)
they have their own pain - there are those different mosquitoes, that tries to enter your every orifice. eyes, ears, nose, urethra. very annoying.

after long journey we arrived into the camp. we wondered why we were the only ones there, so we got out of the car and there they were. a lot of them. that was the fastest i ever built a tent and we jumped in it and called it an early night :)

Re:I spent a year of my life making an ASN.1 compiler in D on Friday October 24, 2025 @04:08AM (#45692145)
of all the encoding i like BER the most as well

(i worked in telecommunications when ASN.1 was common thing)

Re:I spent a year of my life making an ASN.1 compiler in D on Thursday October 23, 2025 @09:36AM (#45681656)
some people simply like pain :D

(i worked with asn1c (not sure which fork) and had to hack in custom allocator and 64bit support. i shiver every time something needs attention in there)

Re:PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021) on Monday October 20, 2025 @03:05AM (#45640747)
as a programmer you have (almost) no control over cache. that's not what i meant.

registers ok, but i want at least one megabyte of them :)

Re:PlayStation 3 Architecture (2021) on Saturday October 18, 2025 @12:56AM (#45625025)
i did a bit dev on ps3 and i remember there was a small memory on the chip, like 256k that was accessible to programmer.

i always found this very appealing, having a blazing fast memory under programmer control so i wonder: why don't we have that on other cpus?

Re:GNU Midnight Commander on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @12:50PM (#45278298)
it was not always named Midnight Commander, it was Mouseless Commander

it was renamed somewhere around 1995

Re:GNU Midnight Commander on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @04:13AM (#45273201)
m602
Re:GNU Midnight Commander on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @12:56AM (#45271838)
volkov was a great virus detector

its size was right at the edge of segment (64k) so when a virus appended to the .com binary, volkov stopped working

Re:GNU Midnight Commander on Wednesday September 17, 2025 @12:51AM (#45271805)
Mouseless Commander :)
Re:"Building my childhood dream PC" (IBM 2168) Part 1 on Friday September 12, 2025 @12:09AM (#45218571)
my childhood dreams include gravis ultrasound
Re:Clankers Die on Christmas on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @04:02AM (#45178937)
that would be very sad christmas :D
Re:Why 'rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @02:28PM (#45043205)
that system was never that rigid, for it has feet of clay (and limestone)
Re:A visual history of Visual C++ on Saturday August 23, 2025 @03:53AM (#44994158)
heh, sorry, but intellisense was the first thing we (in a game studio) turned off immeadiately after install (by deleting the dll as there was no other way) because it was unacceptable resource hog. this was around VS 2003/2005/2008.

visual assist x worked better.

Re:The contrarian physics podcast subculture on Thursday August 21, 2025 @02:49PM (#44976558)
if anyone wants to go through it:

https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric...

possibly recent video from Curt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AThFAxF7Mgw

and that's like 95% of available documentation :)

to put lipstick on the wrong end of a pig :)

this is a mystery to me: ms has all the money in the world to make it right.. yet they can't. windows ecosystem is like one of those eastern european barnyards, where animals live and die between old halves tractors and rusty Lada(s).

Older »