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• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  as for powerpoint, I definitely remember using wordperfect's "Presentation Perfect" long before I was even aware powerpoint existed so I'm all for the wordperfect future... though that's apparently ungoogleable? I'm not imagining that software package am I? I also had...
• Commented on The Radiant Future! (Of 1995)
  do we at least get Transmeta-powered webpads instead of the iPad? (that was the job I had briefly after graduating in 2000 before everything imploded in the crash) I'd also love if SGI somehow survived in this future, but sadly...
• Commented on The ends of education
  A sane CS course since about 2000 really ought to be split into two halves -- theoretical, and applied In the US at least you can be a Computer Engineer which is more or less applied CS. In my...
• Commented on A Quick Infomercial
  I think people worrying about a fab disaster are just too tied to Moore's Law. We are horribly wasteful with CPUs. Millions of perfectly good CPUs are thrown out each year just because they can't run the current bloatware of...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  it's funny everyone talking about the old memory-constrained, program in assembly, self-modifying days as if they're gone. They're still here! Join the demoscene! Write some 6502 code. Enter a size-coding contest. Write BASIC programs to the apple II twitter bot...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  there's also the problem that to make things fast makes things complex. read up on 10Mbps Ethernet... relatively simple to explain and implement, even for 8-bit sytems. Then read up on 10Gbps Ethernet. It's nearly incomprehensible unless you have a...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  Yes, as people pointed out, you'll want to have some high-end processors in your Mars colony. The problem is off-world computing devices are going to be prohibitively expensive. So you might have 10 high-end systems with powerful GPUs on your...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  I was picturing "cut off from Earth, need to build semiconductors from scratch" levels of difficulty here, not the "oh just tell them to stick a new microfab on the next transport". I was thinking more of a "Sam Zeloof...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  the other nice thing about 1970s era computing chips is they're a lot less vulnerable to radiation bit flips. I hate to break it to you but whatever important work you are doing that requires 32GB of RAM isn't going...
• Commented on Covid on Mars
  I always thought for a space colony you'd want 8-bit class processors that you could easily build with early 70s technology and be able to fix with discrete spare parts. My machine of choice for this is the Apple II+,...
• Commented on Introducing Dead Lies Dreaming
  so in the US here but BBC was on the radio going on much more than strictly necessary about recent royal family stuff. In any case, the one person was accusing one prince or another of "whinge"-ing. And while I've...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Speaking of Banks/Culture, after making my way through most of the books I kept hearing about the short story involving Earth, so I tracked it down. And I hated it. Mostly because it turns out that 1960s Europe is more...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  blink It's even RFC2324 compliant. You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmIC1rImhU4 Though I guess I was exagerating a bit saying it does a good job serving of webpages, as it's a bit slow. Also, another cheat, the ethernet card...
• Commented on Crib Notes: Empire Games
  The IBM PC bus was better though, more open and less of a hassle to interface stuff to -- the Apple II bus had dedicated slots for things like the floppy controller, the IBM's slots were all universal. I'm resisting...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  But you only ever see them as undergraduates True, but my experience in industry is they often throw the "boring" tasks (like IoT security) to the new fresh-from-college interns. As a computer engineer I find the discussion of the...
• Commented on The internet of decay
  Everyone's always so down on assembly language. I love programming in assembly language. Though I mostly program in C, which is mostly indistinguishable from assembly. My students hate assembly though, and always want to know when they can forget it....
• Commented on Things Can Only Get Better! (Part 1)
  Is there any serious talk of repealing the 19th ammendment? Or is it just twitter trolling being reported as news? In any case people always seem to forget that there's no "national election" in the US, despite all the rumblings...
• Commented on The Day After
  I actually like the Electoral College. The US is a republic, not a direct democracy. The presidency is not an individual popularity contest, it's a choice by the 50 states (weighted by population). Check the US Constitution, it never even...
• Commented on The Day After
  I wish both sides would quit crying wolf. Is this time going to be the time facism/the antichrist takes over the country? I dunno, the last three times this was claimed didn't pan out, so it's hard to get worked...
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  I've been slowly working my way through all of Ian M. Banks's works. Why? I have to admit it was because of the names on the SpaceX landing crafts. So I guess there's advice for aspiring authors, just get a...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  But you will admit that copying an existing human brain into a non-biological form isn't massively 'way out' SF idea Do we have to admit that? I guess because I am in the electrical/computer field I sort of more clearly...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  I also think people might be over-estimating the effectiveness of self-replicating machines. Earth has been over-run with a form of grey goo running genetic algorithms for billions of years and it only very recently seems to have figured out how...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  Also, the ants in my scenario could be postulating that an advanced civilization full of griefers could construct amazing devices. Giant glass lenses that could focus the power of the sun to a fine point which would destroy our workers...
• Commented on On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers
  I think the missing factor in the Drake equation might just be apathy. If the aliens are anything like humans, the griefers are lazy. Sure if there's an existing mega-laser device that was built for some other reason (propulsion) and...
• Commented on Not a Manifesto
  I'd like to think I more or less understand most of what goes into a cellphone, but at the same time I have a PhD in Computer Engineering with a recent emphasis on embedded systems. A lot of the current...