Viewing profile — heja2009

Around 1990 I had the fortune to learn Parallel-C - a language that was designed during the Transputer hype and was essentially C extended by a few features to support easy paralle…

I worked with QNX 4 at uni and we built a robot system based on 2-4 networked 486/Pentium CPU cards in a rack with it [1]. We fully used the OS to make our robot system both hard r…

AND no dust, grime, etc. These tiny wheels get dirty and clog up pretty fast in human environments and then stop to work and need a good cleaning. Nice for demos but unsuitable for…

Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled…

> Philosophy at the end of the day is about arguing a point; it isn't about producing an aesthetic experience. I'd argue that point. Nietzsche's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spo…

Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim? Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population…

Athens-Sparta would be the Peloponnesian War, Punic wars were between Rome and Carthage. Sorry for the nitpick.

Hmm, but this is a very common problem particularly in history and archaeology and one that requires highly specialized expertise. Therefore almost always a modern unified calendar…

The term was also new to me. From [1] I understand it is a class of cryptocurrency scams starting by building a cordial relationship via social media or dating apps and then sugges…

Interesting. I didn't notice the side notes at all because I immediately zoomed my view to only see the main text as I do with all web pages in this day and age.

best OS I ever had the pleasure to work with

To the contrary there is very good evidence that we pull arbitrary explanations whenever needed. See Gazzaniga's split brain experiments where people gave all sorts of reasons when…

Since it is tidally locked around a low mass star, axial tilt should be near 0 and seasons should not exist [1]. Tidally locked also means much higher temperature than the estimate…

Actually Apple had to find solutions to some of the problems you mention when they transitioned to OS X: * multiple resource forks can be presented as files in a directory, the dir…

C programming - luckily in my opinion - has a culture of very rigorous evaluation of programming techniques especially towards memory-unsafe programming, arguably the biggest weakn…

Yes, it is even pretty much a design principle for newer board games [1]. It started to become popular with games like Settlers of Catan. [1] https://boardgamedesigncourse.com/maki…

Backpropagation was probably the most important step, but there was also the issue of workable training methods for many-layer networks. Fukushima did some very important - but rar…

that's the way some embedded control systems are designed. with some (many) errors (can't read/write) being fatal and shutting down the system after an alarm is sent.

Yes, it is derived from the saying. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabellumpistole

The programming language Occam, in its time the primary language to program Transputers, did not have operator precedence, so you had to use parentheses for anything. It was a huge…

Completely agree, except I'd say physical electronic instruments have a lifetime of about 20-30 years now. Several synths I own are now non- or half-working because of fading displ…

I worked in a big lab of about 100 engineer and scientists in the early 2000s. 2000-2005 more and more high-end SUN workstations were replaced by up-spec Linux machines. Only a han…

The Apple II was hardwired to run on 60Hz AC and used a limited character set. Minimal hardware design has its downsides. In countries that run 50Hz AC games and other real-time so…

She gives very good advice for us non-designers though use color templates. They are available as book or webpage and by trying out just a handful that seem to fit your needs you c…

Well, for rooms with actual tatami mats, you are not really interested in the area, but rather how many mats will fit. Thus, a 24m^2 (12 mat) room with the wrong aspect ratio will …