drallison
Joined 17 years ago
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3,863
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Member since
Oct 4
Recent submissions
Comment · 3 years ago
Amazing work. <sigh/> A whole block of cool research to track. <grin/>
Comment · 3 years ago
The undocumented instructions in the 8085 were described in detail in Dr Dobb's Journal shortly after announcement of the 8085 (with no mention of the "new" instructions).
Comment · 3 years ago
The 6600 was not a superscalar machine but simply a pipelined processor. Superscalar machines first appeared in the floating point processor of the IBM 360/91 and may well be due to John Cocke (IBM) who generalized the notion. Yale Patt (UC Berkeley, U Michigan, U Texas at Austin) refined the ideas. Most processors designed today have superscalar features.
Comment · 3 years ago
The People's Computer Company published many BASIC games in its publications (PCC Newspaper, People's Computers, Dr. Dobbs Journal, Recreational Computing) and in the book, What to Do After You Hit Return: Or, P.C.C.'s First Book of Computer Games. Many of the games were reprinted elsewhere, often without attribution.
Comment · 3 years ago
I worked on the MUMPS Standard when I taught in the Medical Informatics Committee at UC San Francisco. When I first encountered the language, I was appalled. For example, in pre-standard MUMPS, lines with no trailing blanks and lines with one trailing blank had a different interpretation. For those interested, https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/hb/nbshandbook118.p.... At one of the standardization meetings, I embarrassed myself by called MUMPS a "viral disease" because of the pathology of the programming language as defined to an audience of people who saw it as a practical tool they used every day. The standard helped stabilize the language. I acquired an appreciation for the incredible skill application programmers can adapt a general purpose extensible language to do their bidding.
Comment · 3 years ago
Wait. We are exploring boundaries and understanding and not necessarily maintaining the present system. Money? Lend? Ownership? Business? Protecting money? Payments? Privilege? Banking? These are all up for rethinking.
Comment · 3 years ago
Why do we even need banks? What does the financial industry provide? If we were to restructure everything, what would make sense? What are the invariant properties of a viable financial system?
Comment · 3 years ago
Everyone should read this summary/review of the "debate".
More important, everyone should read the paper being debated: Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs, Richard A. De Millo (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Richard J. Lipton and Alan J. Perlis (Yale University). This is one of my favorite CS papers because it exposes a lot of the mechanism behind making proofs that are convincing. What does it mean to say you have proven something.
Comment · 3 years ago
Eric Mitchell will discuss the problem of detecting machine-generated text followed by an open forum Q&A.
Part of EE380, Stanford EE Computer Systems Forum.
Comment · 3 years ago
Don't believe this article. If adding automation and robots to the mix does not decrease cost, it is not going to happen. Labor is the only free variable.
Comment · 3 years ago
It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world and playing polymath math. Hardly a day would go by without an hour or so chat with Carl.
Comment · 3 years ago
It is a real loss, Gumby. Carl and I were friends and spent hours on the telephone solving the problems of the world.
Comment · 3 years ago
Amen. Fuel out of thin air: CO2 capture from air and converted to methanol takes way more energy than can be recovered from the created fuel.