classichasclass

I don't know the internals of BBC BASIC, but many Microsoft-derived BASICs do keep track of the current location in the program text with self-modifying code; the routine is copied to a reserved portion of zero page on 6502 machines for speed. On the C64 this routine lives at $0073 and the pointer is at $007a. Because it's in RAM, this makes it a popular location for wedging in additional behaviour or commands (hence the term "wedge" for such extensions). On some systems like the PET, this was the only way to accomplish it.

Commodore manufactured chips either under the MOS Technology or Commodore Semiconductor Group (CSG) names.

Indirectly. IE was based on Spyglass Mosaic, which was a licensee of NCSA Mosaic. However, Spyglass had rewritten it to deal with the substantial differences between the Mac, Windows and X11 ports, so even early versions of IE aren't directly descended. Microsoft eventually removed Spyglass' copyright message around IE 7, suggesting no Mosaic code persisted by then.

I remember the first patient I put on exenatide, years ago. She was a diabetic that was very brittle and we were having trouble managing it, and I said it was worth a try and she agreed. "It might even cause a bit of weight loss, which I'm sure you won't object to," I said, which we had a good laugh over.

She lost 10 pounds and a whole point off her A1c. And that was just the first of the drug class. She was very pleased with it.

Also, pedantic nitpick: the anglerfish in the photo is female.

No, we still have 10. Real programmers think in octal. ;)

(author) MAE isn't the basis for Blue Box, though I'm quite sure it informed its design. Blue Box/Classic is actually more like MAS, the aborted Mac compatibility layer for PowerOpen/AIX/"A/UX 4," in that it runs PowerPC code directly on the CPU in the "problem state" and uses a paravirtualized operating system and enabler. There is no processor emulation in Classic except for supervisor and faulting instructions.

There are also differences at the level they execute: MAE can, and was designed to run, as an independent process like any other well-behaved X11 application, and multiple users can run multiple sessions of it, but Classic/Blue Box needs operating system support and only one instance of it can be running on a system by a single user.

If the vitals were fine, as far as I'm concerned I don't need to remember the exact number (even though if pressed I probably could), and the same for labs. If a patient wants the exact values we'll make a copy for them.

For the med list, I do know what they're taking, but my usual folks bring in their pill bottles anyway just so we can make sure they all match up. This is also useful because if I want them to discontinue something or change it, I'll write it on the bottle, and make the change in the MAR when we're done. We're not usually making massive med changes on any one visit.

If they saw someone in the interim, I'll have already seen it in the chart before I see them, and if it's not there, I'd have to order the record anyway so it doesn't matter. Most of the offices here are on Epic, so Care Everywhere will usually get their notes.

I think we just have different practice styles here.

Yes, that's all true, but I blame HP more than the others because a large part of what went into Itanium came from HP. They thought that with their simulation results they would eclipse all other architectures with Itanic, and they were way off base, junking an architecture that had room to grow in the process. Even so, PA-RISC was still competitive at least into the days of Mako, though they kind of phoned it in with Shortfin (the last PA-8900).

I read the chart before I come in and get it fresh in my mind, and I do my orders immediately after I've seen them. This is Epic, so that tends to merge with the workflow, since it really wants you to do your documentation after you've done everything anyway.

At least for the health maintenance stuff, I already know what needs to be done on that score before I even enter the room. If I have to grab something out of the record, like a result I wasn't expecting, I can quickly run back to the office (it's just around the corner) and come back.

So, no, no paper.

Some older ones, yeah (TeraScale comes to mind) but modern ones are more like RISC with whopping levels of SIMD. It turns out that VLIW was hard for them too.

That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't make it any more obfuscated.

I have a rule I don't do charting in front of patients. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think it's rude. I might take a couple notes for later, but I do my charts in my office. I have never logged into an EHR in the exam room.

(author) I thought PA-RISC could go a lot further. It had good performance and a fairly sane ISA, and HP put a lot of work into it. Dropping it for Itanic was one of HP's poorest decisions, because compilers just weren't sophisticated enough to make EPIC VLIW efficient, and arguably still aren't. The issue about the "one instruction per cycle" limit got addressed in a different way.

I run it on a SAIC Galaxy 1100 which is a Gecko in a MIL-SPEC portable workstation case, and it is a delight to use. It's snappy and slick. But I have a soft spot for PA-RISC anyway since working on a K250 midrange was my first job out of college.

I've got a 900MHz Fuel with a V12 DCD. It runs fine, though I never ran a V10 in it. Biggest problem with it is the power supply so I find myself using the Indy more these days.

If you mean the updated MacLynx I've been working on, I don't have TLS in it yet, but now that the PowerPC version is back I'm planning to embed Crypto Ancienne in it for opportunistic TLS 1.3 (unfortunately too much for anything less than a high end 68040).

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/maclynx-beta-6-back-to-p...

Another satisfied Fastmail user. We don't pay a great deal for it and the service has been very good. Be the customer, not the product.

Commodore infamously used TI chips in their calculators too, leading to the situation where Jack Tramiel was getting massively undercut by TI using the same chips in their own TI calculators for less. Buying the ailing MOS Technology gave him the vertical integration he wanted and enabled him to force TI out of the home computer market only a few years later. Revenge is such a dirty word.

Likewise! That's what I was expecting to see.

Our home inspector missed the front door failing to latch!

(author) Hey, thanks! The linked series of blog posts are even more detailed.

They Live has a related concept with the sunglasses.

200 patients is an extremely small panel size for the typical primary care provider in the United States. Many have several thousand.

I think there is a big problem with antibiotic overuse in food animals, certainly. Although they can be useful for growth, large livestock farms are environments where drug-resistant infections can spread easily. I try to buy antibiotic-free meats as a rule but that doesn't really stop the damage caused by the meat companies that don't care about it.

As far as human antibiotic use, the flip side are the colleagues who will tell me that they did a thorough workup on a patient, found no indication for antibiotics, told the patient so to the best of their ability, and got dinged on the insurer's survey or castigated on doctor rating sites. I'm of course only hearing the provider's side of the story, but nobody likes to be told no, even when it's the right answer. (Also insert opioids, stimulants and benzodiazepines into this conversation.)

In the United States, at least, veterinary preparations are broadly manufactured to the same standard (some veterinary drugs are relabeled stock originally manufactured for human use, even). Dosing and concentrations may differ, however.

I can't agree with you there, because if you're treating with the wrong dose or for the wrong length of time, you run the risk of making that infection resistant. For communicable illnesses, that can be a risk for others. But I appreciate your honesty.

I should also add that those pharmacies, if they are based on the United States, invariably have a licensed provider in there signing off (they would be illegal otherwise).

Counterexample: what about antibiotics? There are negative externalities to their inappropriate use (yes, there are plenty of stories about the infections that were missed, but that has a lot of selection bias). There are countries that allow their use over the counter. Is that a good thing?

Are you panning the article?

You could absolutely boot a stripped-down Mac OS 8 on a floppy, including the beige G3. Apple even provided them ("Disk Tools").

A few megabytes, in this case, because Doug was actually going through the machine's Toolbox ROM, not the operating system.