Viewing profile — nigel_bree

Interesting. Both timely, given the recent discovery of the massive failure to disclose the asset hiding in his family trust by Carl Bates, yet also rendered less pertinent because…

> Are these people you know actively applying for better jobs and not getting them? No, because the decades have worn them down. It's been a long time since there have ever been jo…

> But paradoxically there is simultaneously a lack of top tier within New Zealand Really? I'm aware of some extremely top-tier and wildly underemployed talent - the problem is that…

Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements. …

The big thing I think with any book is to aim to inspire people (especially younger ones) to create for themselves, and while there's probably a way to do that with an exegesis of …

Hey Nils, love your work - back around '90 when I joined Mark Williams I was a big Scheme fan, so your whole t3x.org site and "Scheme 9 from Empty Space" particularly puts a smile …

Definitely true. And as well, the level of innovation that brought, particularly in places like Australia/NZ or the (then) East Germany/Ukraine, the outrageous cost of components m…

The classic "Nautilus" manual was really interesting on two sides; one was the quality of the writing, which was all down to Fred Butzen - he just had a real knack for clarity and …

Yes, and also notably Dave Conroy of MicroEMACS fame. I do believe that as with QNX and MKS Systems and Watcom, Coherent was mostly built by former graduates of Waterloo university…

Yes, prior to 4.x processes were strictly limited to 64kb code and 64kb data - essentially the equivalent to what MS-DOS programmers would call the small memory model only. There a…

It's not based on V6, although it was basically created as a clone of it (and on the PDP-11, no less - the x86 versions of Coherent until 4.x were basically just minimal ports that…

You'd likely find the experience pretty miserable, not so much because of the C compiler - Steve did a great job with that - but actually because of the filesystem. Coherent was ar…

Yeah, just to confirm that for v7.1, we got a full source license of it for Symantec Ghost because Microsoft had withdrawn permission for us to distribute anything at all to do wit…

Not sure about the specific text the parent had in mind but "Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics" by Newman and Sproull (1979, but I bought it in '81 in the student edition…

I love this article, and have recommended it many times in discussion with young people learning programming in other forums (although it's rare for them to come back to me to say …

Anyone from HN who wants to can drop by on the way to a more traditional tourist spot like Mangawhai or further north (although over summer I'm often away at the weekends racing st…

I currently live in Kaiwaka not far from Mangawhai and have since Symantec bought out Ghost in '98, as that helped me afford a first house. It's a wonderful place to live. I did a …

> I think I later upgraded to a 100MB IDE disk, but was still lucky. Well, it really wasn't luck as much as keeping with the electrical specs. Do that, you'd never see a problem, a…

Yeah, cross-subsidised products like that were an issue. But it's worth noting that part of the fine line we had to walk was that lots of the people who bought Coherent had hardwar…

> What killed it is they, for some reason, spent time and treasure port XWindows to it instead of working on a TCP/IP stack Just to be clear, there's a whole heaping helping of rea…

> The bug was triggered when your drive when into a very common thermal recalibration mode As the person responsible (alas), my specific recollection of this particular bug was tha…

Genuine Ghost - aka "Symantec Ghost Solution Suite" was indeed file-level, built on its own filesystem code, although the NTFS support was initially fairly rough and the image file…