Recent submissions

Comment · 4 months ago
Read on to the last paragraph, I think what they meant to hint at is this:

> And about those WWII bombing raids? Midway through our work, we noticed a demolition team carefully dismantling a live 500-pound Allied bomb just 350 feet from our location. According to a local office worker, this wasn’t unusual; numerous unexploded bombs had been found on-site in the years prior, prompting evacuations in 2004.

If you live in Europe, there's a reasonable chance you've had the experience of being (or living) in the proximity of an uncovered leftover WW2 bomb at some point that needed to be defused. Because those bombs didn't all disappear in the 40s.

I'm guessing in this case that could've meant somebody could've found that entire hangar and its contents and just cleaned the "junk" out entirely.

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
Norway and Switzerland are both Schengen area countries though and have been for decades, which is why there would be much less friction in getting in as a migrant, or no friction at all as a traveler.
Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
> Not once has a European ever given the US credit for the Marshall Plan.

How can you honestly say that though. A blatant overgeneralization of a large group of people, but this has been a recurring theme on HN lately.

So I would agree that people spouting anti-US sentiment have been conveniently downplaying, leaving out, or haven't been educating themselves on, this important part of US-European history, but what's new.

In the meantime, streets have been named after Marshall, plaques and statues have been erected (including recent times) at least in the more Western parts of continential Europe where much of the Marshall Plan funds ended up, and its extreme importance is quite an ingrained part of WW2 school history education. Just as one example, Arnhem was largely rebuilt using these funds and has historically paid homage and still does today with such tributes and memorials.

Comment · 5 months ago
I'm sure that person must've been a pretty bad one. But to tie Dutch colonialism, apartheid and WW2 war criminals (centuries later by the way) together this way to excuse these discriminatory remarks is pretty daft. Needless to say, not everyone was/is like that.
Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Very cool work.. and frustating running into walls imposed by manufacturers, I imagine! I've also been working on GPU-based audio plugins for a long time and have done some public material on the subject.

Just my two cents: have you considered using a server/daemon process that runs separately and therefore more controllably outside a DAW (and therefore a client-server approach for your plugin instances)? It could allow you to have a little bit more OS-based control.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
History is funny because at that time in the 90s there was a company called Bitboys Oy. That company was founded by some Finnish demoscene members and was developing a series of graphics cards, Pyramid3D and Glaze3D, with a programmable pipeline around 1997-1999 [1]. This was at around 5 years before the first commercial shader capable card was released.

Even though Wikipedia classifies it as vaporware, there are prototype cards and manuals floating around showing that these cards were in fact designed and contained programmable pixel shaders, notably:

- The Pyramid3D GPU datasheet: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tr2520...

- The pitch deck: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/tritec...

- The hardware reference manual: http://vgamuseum.info/images/doc/unreleased/pyramid3d/vs203_... (shows even more internals!)

(As far the companies go: VLSI Solution Oy / TriTech / Bitboys Oy were all related here.)

They unfortunately busted before they could release anything, due to a wrong bet in memory type choice (RDRAM, I think) and letting their architecture rely on that, then running out of money, perhaps some other problems. In the end their assets were bought by ATI.

As for 3dfx, I would highly recommend watching the 3dfx Oral History Panel video from the Computer History Museum with 4 key people involved in 3dfx at the time [2]. Its quite fun as it shows how 3dfx got ahead of the curve by using very clever engineering hacks and tricks to get more out of the silicon and data buses.

It also suggests that their strategy was explicitly about squeezing as much performance out of the hardware, and making sacrifices (quality, programmability) there, which made sense at the time. I do think they would've been pretty late to switch to the whole programmable pipeline show, for to that reason alone. But who knows!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

Comment · 4 years ago
I'm curious to know why they have chosen to use FreeBSD as a base as opposed to Darwin/XNU on which macOS itself is based.

Nothing against FreeBSD (happy user here) so there's probably some good reasoning behind this.

Comment · 4 years ago
Haha, the good old DL360. That fan noise was loud. Let alone the spinning, whining 15k SCSI disks..
Comment · 4 years ago
Or maybe three times sync;sync;sync just to make sure :)
Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah, though I would say human readable bytecode, and it is interesting to see that in the actual context. For anyone who's interested, there's a git repository containing a historical reconstruction of the original BSDs.

I believe one of the first BSD versions containing sendmail (by Eric Allman) is this one: https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/bd282c88c1b3c2575... (almost 40 years ago!)

Its a little hard to read due to the format, but here's some explanation of the (1983, earliest?) config file that was used back then: https://github.com/weiss/original-bsd/blob/bd282c88c1b3c2575...

From what I grasp, it started as an extensive dynamic parser that needed to understand a lot of rules, and I guess with each new RFC and version, the rules needed to be extended too. And the config file could be loaded into a memory image to improve performance.

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