505

Sad day. I enjoyed the fiction and the Byte column, despite him being a jerk sometimes.

Anyone interested in science fiction should read at least The Mote in God's Eye.

see also perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15094196 and https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-08/uota-nbr0817...

I see some of my favourites among other replies. I don't think I see these:

http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/steele.pdf

My favourite bit of design advice is for when a program is about to delete a lot of user data.

The program should require cognizant confirmation:

  Are you sure you want to destroy 5 days' work? Type DESTROY 5 DAYS' WORK to confirm.

I tried to stick to (old) Apple interface guidelines for a long time. Eventually I realised, for instance, that only tiny numbers of people need to be taught how to use a mouse.

Thank you for scanning and posting this. I have a copy kicking about and keep meaning to share.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a magical level of reliability.

Priest, like Aldiss, is a favourite writer of mine. I especially enjoyed reading Inverted World as a teenager.

Obituary by Christopher Priest.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/21/brian-aldiss-o...

IIRC Priest and Aldiss were friends.

Upvoting your comment. I hope you won't minding me suggest you update the first line to read Clarke rather than Clark. Perhaps I'm tired, but it took me a minute to figure out who you meant.

I think he was pretty constructive about it, by HN standards.

Reproducing the link to the Ask HN from which the article was compiled. I didn't find it on the first read, though it's probably my own fault.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14146850

Thanks for the question and follow up.

On inspection of the examples, perhaps even Dickensian.

Retailers in Sydney are worried. Some of them at least. Apparently Amazon is coming soon.

I report bugs sometimes. I develop and test software for a living, and so my paying clients come first. This includes both software they are using and relevant tools that I am using in order to help the clients.

After or alongside those come the support and development teams of free (speech) software that I use. After that, certain developers of non-free software. As an exercise for the student, guess where Microsoft comes in that list.

Great idea for a wicked problem.

Phone manufacturers will be against it, telcos, retailers, and many consumers. Maybe we could get Green movement groups on board?

By the way, the Mac I'm using now was bought in Australia and the keyboard has a rectangular Return key and the modifiers labeled using text rather than icons.

Historically the Macintosh distinguished between Enter and Return. IIRC on the Lisa the Return key was on the main part of the keyboard and the Enter key was on the numeric keypad. In many apps they did the same thing, but I think in LisaCalc the Enter key would enter the contents of the selected cell and leave it selected. Return would do the same and then select the cell below. IIRC the Mac version of Microsoft Multiplan did the same.

On the MBP I'm typing this on, the key is labeled enter in small type and below that return in larger type. I think holding down the fn key and pressing that key does the enter action, while without fn it does the return action. I am pretty sure my full-size Mac keyboard has return on the main keyboard and enter on the numeric keypad. I think the Lisa was the same.

IIRC there was no Enter key on the original (128K) Mac keyboard, but the optional numeric keyboard had the Enter key.

Apple have an old user interface guideline that basically said that the main keyboard was for primarily typing text, while traditional data entry was secondary. Hence the function of the Return key was strictly to insert a carriage return into some text. And so no Enter or Control key on the original keyboard. As a kind of substitute Apple introduced the Command (Swedish campground) key, but it wasn't a direct mapping of Control. And IBM further muddied the waters by introducing CUA. By the time of the Mac II the default keyboard was much more compatible with common computers. It was a time of rapid change.

smh.com.au is the Sydney Morning Herald. It has some of the best news in Sydney but I hate the website. When I follow a link like this one and the article is interesting, I invariably forget to check the ads. When I get started reading, there always seems to be a movie with audio that will start playing off the screen.

Smell, or perhaps taste, is one of the first senses that evolved. Maybe it will be one of the first we get right in machines.

(I am pleased you brought up Stephen W, and also that you asked us not to. That's all you'll get from me.)

a review at http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/ANKOS/Ankos.html

In decades of working with used Apple devices, I don't recall seeing this article until today.

Turkey is alongside the state of California as places where I guess Apple has been forced to support products for longer.

Surprisingly present (and under "Mac Desktops"):

    - Apple II (not "Apple ][") 
    - Apple III (not "Apple ///")

Surprisingly absent:

    - Apple //e, //c, //gs
    - Mac XL, Lisa, and Lisa 2

The cost to Apple of this confused documentation will be negligible, I expect.

9 days, 8 hours, and 15 minutes

Challenged by What Is the Name of This Book but loved it.

If Hofstadter hadn't changed my life forever, maybe Smullyan would have.

Circa 1983 I got hold of the paper FIG-Forth via snail mail. (Modems? none in my house those days.) I got a version going on my housemate's Apple ][+, which wasn't too hard as I'd learned 6502 assembly/machine language, and I understood the Apple's peripherals reasonably well.

I hacked together a boot disk which booted and presented the Forth REPL. One of my first projects was a text editor.

I probably still love Forth, and later on I sort of used the knowledge to learn PostScript. I went on to do a lot of work in PostScript and I definitely love that. And miss them both.

The title made me think of Eric S Raymond. Don't miss the mention in the article.

Not sure whether you're asking whether DSP is still relevant (I think it is) or a textbook published in the 80s would be relevant. I imagine such a book might talk a lot about the hardware and software available at the time.

At some point before 1985, an algorithm was found that could solve it in 21 "twists". (Just checked in my old copy of Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas.)

I sometimes think we should find a way to apply Asimov's three laws to business entities. Then, when some company's property achieves 'dangerous' AI, everything might come out in the wash.

Most companies are controlled by a mixture of computing machinery and humans (sometimes following explicit rules). We trust industries a with lot of important stuff right now. We already have legal systems trying to stop them harming people.