Lightsynth's History

I typed RUN – and was completely blown away. It was a pure jaw-on-the-floor moment. As I've already mentioned, the same program in BASIC took a few seconds to run - you could see the characters appearing one after another in sequence as they were POKEd into screen memory. But when I typed RUN, here...
...all of the characters appeared on the screen at once. Instantly. They were just THERE. The same program that the PET took several lazy seconds to complete in BASIC ran in less time than you could measure in machine language. It was as good as instantaneous. Machine language had to be at least a thousand times faster than BASIC.

If you are a programmer you owe it to yourself to read this fascinating essay. It brought back memories (not many of them good) of my struggles with medieval computing systems like the Tandy Color Computer 2, the TRS-80 and the VAX 11/750.

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On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

All the President's men: Obama enjoys 20-MAN motorcade and splashes $1.5m on Hawaiian holiday | Mail Online

All the President's men: Obama enjoys 20-MAN motorcade and splashes $1.5m on Hawaiian holiday | Mail Online This is just silly. If you are the President of the United States, and you want to impress your childhood friends, why go through the trouble of flying down to meet them? Especially since the country is having a rough time lately, that's a lot of money! Here's how I would had done it: Find the next "VIP" government flight between Hawaii and DC that still had two seats left. Put the two guys on that flight, if anyone asks about them they are "under Presidential Orders." When they get to DC, pick them up in a Secret Service Yukon and drive them to either Blair House or the White House, where they'll stay as guests for a weekend or whatever. Plus they get to hang out with their buddy who happens to be the President of the United States. And all of this at very little cost to the taxpayer, since the VIP flights would had happened regardless, the fr...

The Insomniac Coder

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