back
user profile
emptybits
6,429karma·1,004submissions·November 20, 2012
about
LOAD "*", 8, 1
Darren Stone, Vancouver, BC, Canada
"Once men turned their thinking over to
machines in the hope that this would
set them free. But that only permitted
other men with machines to enslave
them." - Frank P. Herbert, Jr., 1965
"The programmer, like the poet, works
only slightly removed from pure
thought-stuff. He builds his castles
in the air, from air, creating by
exertion of the imagination."
- Fred P. Brooks, Jr., 1975recent activity (1,004 total)
comment
I have questions about the environmental impact of EV batteries when it comes time to replace or dispose of them. I've read a few things, including an old statement by Tesla on the topic.[1] >…
comment
Hosting public PS files may be an academic thing. But commercial use wasn't rare. I did PostScript programming for Xerox Research briefly in the late 1980s. I needed to do batches of mathematic…
comment
Not to detract from how amazing WaveCel might be. Any safety material advancement is great news. But this is assumes we need new head protection to fit the old moulds, so to speak. OTOH, there are or …
comment
Total objects: 17,642
Status non-operational: 15,389
Yikes?
comment
> "PRE-SAFE® Sound is activated if your vehicle detects that a collision is unavoidable" See also: Peril Sensitive Sunglasses™
comment
> FTA: "I have sketched game ideas since I could draw a straight line. This is from my childhood sketchbook." Sounds like he's doing what must be done. Very excited for the author. W…
comment
I love the Lensrentals teardowns! I just finished reading this teardown of a then-flagship Sony camera that was exposed to saltwater. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/…
comment
Fond memories of Sony and the Walkman era. I worked part time for Sony from the mid to late 1980s while I was a student, paying tuition bills. It was a dream job for a consumer electronics nerd and bu…
comment
That's super impressive! The Mini Bros game is 2.5 kilobytes of high level source[1] so a fair resource comparison should either include FastBasic 3.4's runtime footprint (if interpreted?) a…
comment
Okay, replying to my own curiosity... The above byte sequence can be found in a dump of Centipede's ROM. 00001280 a2 13 a9 ab 5d 20 21 ca 10 fa 85 fe 60 02 bb 5a |....] !.....`..Z|
0…
comment
The article tells us the non-Atari game retained a damning Morse message in its ROM. From another source[1] (unverified), this may be the ROM data the article refers to: .BYTE 2, 0BB, 5A, 30 (…
comment
The elderly are particularly vulnerable. I'm a Canadian and I'd like to plug an international charitable movement called Cycling Without Age[1]. In helping found a local chapter, I've r…
comment
Early 90s revision control flashbacks on the Windows front ... I recall living through migrations from MKS RCS (by Mortice Kern Systems) to SourceSafe (when it was a One Tree Software product before M…
comment
Another BBC story linked in the article has these amazing claims:[1] * 2005 "NASA scientists successfully revived bacteria that had been encased in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years. ... …
comment
As we accumulate small additional likelihoods of Martian life, I wonder if humans will 1) put more resources into manned missions for intensive and flexible study to get to the bottom of these mysteri…