Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.
Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(
Oh, it was really gold, totally agree with you. I remember Steve's amazing stuff .. also, Circuit Cellar cannot go unmentioned in this thread too of course, that is for sure essential reading for the budding hacker needing a break from the ML-wash, imho.
It was also where I first started learning about synthesizers, which is another subject my uncle and I would get burned fingers about - him building the oscillator and me doing the filter and so on .. but there were other magazines of that ilk, I thing Radio Electronics transitioned to "Electronics Magazine" in my market in those days (Australia), or so it seems through the fog of time ..
I can come clean and say that I have all of these magazines safely .PDF'ed for the sailboat somewhere, I do know that for sure anyway, lol ..
Yes, it's complex software that has to interact very closely with the hardware and it's written in C++.
Those aren't excuses, but they are explanations. The competition from Adobe crashes a lot, too. It's not necessarily a competence or money thing.
Also, the windows taskbar in windows 11 crashes a couple times a day for me. And Microsoft is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And, I'm assuming, very talented engineers worked on that taskbar.
I don't think they vibecode the core of windows though. From what I heard particularly (from osdev community) the core of windows is really good and well structured.
“Vista bad” comments on a forum supposedly frequented mostly by IT people is just plain ridiculous. If you think “Vista bad, 7 good” then you clearly need to reevaluate your understanding of computer technology.
You make it sound like the same bugs have been there for 25 years. That again isn't fair given that many, many, many new features have been added to the project since its inception in 2002. They are also somewhat at the mercy of the MLT framework that they depend on for a lot of the heavy lifting.
And they do fix crash bugs. All the time. You can see that in the announcements they put out after each release. I think the general perception is that it is indeed becoming more robust as time goes on as new developers have come on board to help. The project is gaining momentum that it hadn't really had before.
A lot of people have answered that it is a useful tool for job searching. My experience was a bit on the other side of the coin. Our company wanted more of a presence on the site to gain visibility so managers like myself were encourged (told) to sign up and post on it. We also received video training on how to write catchy descriptions of ourselves (under 50 words ofc) and stuff like that.
From the online job searcher's point of view, it's one of the least awful circle jerks in a Dante's Inferno-esque series of circle jerks. It is only the first or second circle jerk, at worst.
If you like this kind of thing, check out Coding Secrets on YouTube. He goes further back in time to show how they pulled off seemingly impossible effects on a really old console: the Sega Genesis.
I'll see your Atari 800 and raise you my Atari 2600 with its whopping 128 bytes of RAM. Bytes with a B. I can kinda sorta call it a computer because you could buy a BASIC cartridge for it (I didn't and stand by that decision - it was pretty bad).
I thought the timex Sinclair 1000 win 2 Kbytes of ram was bad.
The membrane keyboard wasn’t great (the lack of a space bar was a wierd choice) but it did work. We had programs on casette and did get the 16Kbyte memory expansion.
The downside of spreadsheets is they can really slow your model down. Every cell change triggers a full recompute of the 3D model. VarSets offer much faster performance while sacrificing a couple spreadsheet features. So always choose VarSets over spreadsheets if you can.
On the one hand it's clearly suboptimal for any change, even ones that nothing depends on, to trigger a recompute. But also it feels like there's something a bit broken with spreadsheet dependency resolution in the first place. I've never been able to nail down a test case, but models seem to go over a performance cliff at a certain point. Ordinarily I'd put it down to something being unavoidably quadratic, but I've had cases where I'm certain that the same model is radically slower after being reloaded off disk.
Steve Ciarcia was incredibly influential to young me. His projects were wild. I only built one of his designs: an 8052AH-BASIC microcontroller board that I still have in the basement. He did more "mainstream" stuff like the series of articles on building your very own 8088-based PC compatible (a huge effort back in the day). But then he'd do crazy stuff like an 8051-based board that calculated the Mandelbrot set networked to a PC, and the more of the boards that you built and connected to the network, the faster the computation of the result.
Radio Electronics was gold for articles on cable & satellite TV descramblers. The only problem was that too often, the parts list would have one inductor that was basically made of Pure Unobtainium where I lived :-(
reply