Two Stop Bits | IcePic's comments

IcePic 25 days ago | parent | on: Learning from the Amiga API/ABI
Read that and some other articles on the same site and it presents a lot of opinions as facts which is sad, since this detracts from some interspersed valid or interesting points that are there.
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- KODust 25 days ago
  I find it useful to discount heavily for hyperbole when reading stuff written by Amiga people, including the otherwise essential Bagnall books. I think the shock of being able to do multimedia-ish stuff in the mid 1980’s somehow causes reality to distort when considering the stunning mediocrity (or worse) of much of the AmigaOS software stack.
  (I can write some choice words on the Mac’s software stack too. None of the 80’s 32-bit platforms were without significant and avoidable problems.)
  edit: misplaced punctuation
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IcePic 36 days ago | parent | on: The Computer Collection: Unix Workstations
This might make you happy?
http://www.datormuseum.se/
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- boofar 35 days ago
  It certainly does, though I can't find any Intergraph stuff there.
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IcePic 40 days ago | parent | on: Honest and Elitist Thoughts on Why Computers Were ...
Well, look at the critique when Gnome3 came out to replace Gnome2. What pissed people off was exactly that it: 1. Set a certain amount of choices on how the gui should work and 2. Removed a lot of settings, especially those that would have allowed people to reset the things in point 1 to what they liked from Gnome 1&2.
It's one thing for a GUI maker to move the task bar from side to top/bottom for instance, but another to also not allow you to have it back where you "need" it to be. Even when you do want to move defaults (like tmux changing hotkey from screens ctrl-a to ctrl-b) it still is a good idea to allow people to set it back, even if only for a transitional period. Muscle memory takes a while to change for some, and GUIs are not except from that, so if you always had the trashcan to the right, moving it to the left will piss someone off, but not as much as preventing that someone from moving it back again, if that is their preference, perhaps even a preference that your previous versions of the GUIs made for them.
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IcePic 67 days ago | parent | on: Signal Carnival
Super impressive
IcePic 113 days ago | parent | on: Why fastDOOM is fast
I seem to recall Carmack looking back at the code of Doom and going something like "if I knew then what I know now then it would be lots faster", meaning that certain algorithms were poorly chosen at the time, and that today we know of lots of tricks and improved ways to render the same thing with less work, so perhaps there are lots of people now that could improve it.
Not saying this isn't a great feat, just that things like compression also advanced in the last 30 years in both speed and efficiency, so it stands to reason that 3d engines (especially the early ones) would have certain spots you could improve upon a lot.
- bmonkey325 113 days ago
  While all true. To quote Steve Jobs “Great artist ship…”. At some point the product has to go out the door and start making money.
IcePic 165 days ago | parent | on: Parsing the c64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
On C64, all neat stuff is cheats. =)
IcePic 264 days ago | parent | on: Fast linedrawing algorithm for 6502 cpus
Yeah, I thought it ended with trying to optimize bresenham and just leave it at that.
- ddingus 257 days ago
  Seriously! This is a very clever technique. It seems to trade a bit of quality for speed, but not enough to matter in most cases.