Recent content by harborsparrow

P S - A trivia question (and please don't answer it here--let people look it up). WHO invented the concept of an assembler (from which, later, the concept of a compiler was derived)?

Some confusions above, and I want to try to clarify: * there is the "machine instruction set", which is the real x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) * there is Microsoft assembler code, which is called a LOW-level programming language because many (but not all) of its instructions correspond...

This is a confusing statement. The very first IBM PC used an Intel 8088 microprocessor, which is essentially the same instruction set as x86 except that it had 8-bit registers instead of 16 on an 8-bit duplexing bus, and so it ran a bit slower than an 8086. For many years thereafter, IBM...

As PeroK said, just scroll on by. The AI overview is Google stealing information from other websites and not giving them traffic or even credit. And, it's often wrong to boot.

I am a big reader of Kindle books and agree completely that the ungainly user interface of Kindle hardware readers tends to iffset the benefits of E Ink. Thus, I do most reading on tablets or phones using the free Kindle software reader. I do keep a hardware Kindle device charged and loaded...

I started working from home in 2010, doing mainly database coding. So the pandemic didn't bring anything new to me on that front. I hated commuting, I hated dealing with certain co-workers, and I hated all the extraneous meetings that being in the office inevitably resulted in. I think WFH is...

By the time you get old, you learn things. "New" (mostly young) programmers have always seemed to prefer to use loosely typed languages. First it was Visual Basic. Now it's Python. They hate and avoid the strongly typed languages such as Java and C#. However, speaking for both my spouse and...

The bomb's voice is first heard, I think, starting around 4:19. The ship's computer around 6:53, and more interestingly, around 13:30. And a few other places. That computer can deliver the most devastating news in the most conversational, I-don't-care tone!

Best computer AI voice I can remember was in John Carpenter's quirky Dark Star film

One other possible architecture I once encountered might be of interest to you. I once worked on a radiation monitoring system that delivered an analysis of what-all elements were radiating from a source with what intensity. In such systems, the detector receives so much information so fast...

The digital channels within fiber telecom systems in the USA are a hierarchy beginning with the smallest channel (DS0), of which 28 channels are muxed into DS1, of which a fixed number of channels are muxed into a DS3 digital channel. You can start here...

Back in the 80s, I wrote RT software at Bell Labs for fiber optics comm systems which consisted of as many as 16 different MCUs which needed to work together. We ended up using a shared memory bank to hold options in predetermined addresses. There was a careful analysis and only certain MCUs...

This is old but likely still has some useful info: https://harbormist.com/quickrefs/eclipse/

Ringo Starr, while not completely unnoticed, was definitely underrated. I don't know about actual virtuosity but in terms of never intruding or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, acting in complete support of the music at hand. Just plain excellent taste.

In terms of lifestyle (though it's a bit dated now, and not gender-fair): https://genius.com/Stan-rogers-white-collar-holler-lyrics