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spitfire

4,595 karma · joined March 8, 2009

steven@stevenshack.com
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spitfire··on Previous: A NeXT Computer Emulator
I mean the ultimate model is either a turbo cube with dimension board, or a turbo colour station.

The turbo cube dimension had dual monitors (one colour one bw) in 1989 which was cool. Myself I just run a turbocolour station.

spitfire··on Previous: A NeXT Computer Emulator
For anyone wondering nextcomputers.org has the necessary rom files available in their file section.-

Along with just about all the public ally available software ever made. It’s really a treasure trove.

spitfire··on Previous: A NeXT Computer Emulator
Yes, improv and lighthouse design quantrix (a pixel perfect clone after lotus killed improv) work fine in previous.

Quantrix is also a fat binary so you can run it on x86 nextstep or openstep under in a vm.

spitfire··on Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery
What is a NOC agent?

National occupation classification? Network operations centre?

spitfire··on Ian Fleming explains how to write a thriller (2019)
This thread is absolutely fantastic. It's hitting all the obscure spy thrillers. First sandbaggers now Len Deightons game set match. What next, Mr. Palfrey of Westminster? ?

That said, you're watching James Bond wrong. Watch it as a porno. There's a quick excuse for a plot, then you see the "spy" doing all sorts of cool and exotic stuff.

Same thing with movies like top gun, ignore the story and just watch it as an excluse to fly $50M planes near the edge.

spitfire··on Ian Fleming explains how to write a thriller (2019)
The sandbaggers was /fantastic/.

For those who don't know, it's basically accountancy with violence.

spitfire··on Luxury Media
I like the free bookmarks magazines send me. How else will someone know I read Monocle, The Economist or The Rake if I don't have their bookmarks?
spitfire··on Generating Fashion Using AI
> I agree. People who will carry out this activity at a high professional level in creative agencies will have to deepen in the observation and study of language.

So they have to be a character out of a William Gibson novel? Do they rip the labels off their clothes too?

PS: This is awesome.

spitfire··on FAA approves unleaded fuel for piston fleet
So this is a 100octane fuel? Can it be sold through regular retail chains?

Since avgas is such a small market I’m thinking that might raise its TAM as a “premium plus” sort of product.

spitfire··on I have complicated feelings about TDD
I'm using "vomit draft" from now on.
spitfire··on Local simulation feature to be removed from all Autodesk Fusion 360 versions
So Autodesk fusion 360 is opting out of government and defence contracts?

I presume there's rules somewhere where parts for the F-22, or HIMARS can't be hosted on some random companies cloud.

spitfire··on Excel is pretty dang cool
I'm surprised this thread got so large without anyone mentioning Lotus Improv or Quantrix. Quantrix was the later re-implementation of Lotus by lighthouse design, after Lotus had canceled Improv.

Improv/Quantrix was a multidimensional spreadsheet, Each model could contain multiple tables, and of course multiple views. Formulas were separate from data, so it was easy to audit a model. Clicking on a formula (in 1991) showed you all the related input and output sources.

It was the first spreadsheet with pivot tables.

Of course since it's secretly a database down below, you could do databasey things like joins and group by. In 1991.

Videos of using Improv.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbsfvdZXE7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbsfvdZXE7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTko_Pt2ZZg

spitfire··on Ask HN: If money was no object, what ambitious project would you work on?
A modern smalltalk OS.
spitfire··on Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google
I actually built this exact thing for myself when I was looking for property to buy. I built a VAE DNN to identify sandy white beaches, added in a bunch of data about economics and such, built a custom McPain index (Inverse of the distance to the nearest chain restaurant (McDonalds, Burger king, Starbucks, etc)*1000000)[1].

Fed a bunch of countries coastline into it, and popped out ranked beachfronts to investigate more.

1. I once went to Ao Nang, Thailand a few years after the tsunami and found a really cool chill cheap beach town and loved it. Went back a few years later and right on the main street there was a McDonalds. Across from that there was a Burger king, ~100M up the road was another McDonalds. I will never return.

spitfire··on GlobalFoundries joins Google’s open source silicon initiative
Last time I was heavily playing with IB's API they were 250ms rollups of the market. So not useful for HFT or anything, but plenty fast enough for prosumer trading.
spitfire··on Breaking our Latin-1 assumptions (2017)
IF it's TD, then it's AS/400. For reals.
spitfire··on Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?
That's one of them. There's a few more with really dark screens floating around that go into a bit more detail.
spitfire··on Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?
Steve Jobs demo of NeXT's interface builder and enterprise object framework.

The IB demo has him building an interface without touching code. He goes on to demo a simple app without code. This was in 1989, I'm still waiting for Linux to get close to that.

The EOF demo has him building a CRUD app with queries and joins from IB. Again in 1990. Imagine the original rails tutorial but 15 years earlier. Still waiting on this one too.

spitfire··on Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot
Try “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!” instead. It should work better.
spitfire··on Google's Subsea Fiber Optics
Apropos HN and fibre cable laying, I'm told Makailay cable laying software rents out for $20K/Month. Could be more now - this is ~10/yo information.

There's lots of niche markets out there.

https://www.makai.com/cable-software/makailay/

spitfire··on Apple introduces new professional training to support growing IT workforce
I was thinking enterprise objects framework which came after they realized databasekit was a dud.

It’s equivalent to rails or similar orms. But it integrated with interface builder. See this [1] demo about 23 minutes in… just after he demos how great next step handles faces. He demos building a query crud app fully drag n drop.

Are you sure DO was available in OS X?

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk

spitfire··on Apple introduces new professional training to support growing IT workforce
Steve jobs got burnt by enterprise customers at NeXT. Once he got burnt he had a habit of pivoting away and never revisiting a subject.

Which is a shame NeXT (apple) had a world leading ORM and RPC system in 1990. It would still impress people today.

spitfire··on We need a middle class for startups
> You can get top-tier VC returns by building a portfolio of Mittelstand businesses ($10M-$1B in revenue).

Constellation software does exactly that. They've quietly been the Warren Buffet of SaaS business for like 20+ years now.

spitfire··on Webb Telescope Image Sharpness Check
Fun fact the Hubble space telescope and now the James Webb uses NeXT computers to calibrate some of the instruments on the ground. Possibly even to test out configuration changes.

In particular they’re used for the Aberrated Beam Analyser. The ABA has been used to verify the optical performance of many different science instruments.

spitfire··on What happens in your dog’s brain when you speak
Not just a few words. They can form full, coherent self referential sentences. In one of the videos Bunny uses assistive buttons to ask who she is after she looks in the mirror.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ

spitfire··on The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996
One of the video ports. I think digital video port.

The base model supported audio and "moose cam" (A webcam, in 1996!). If you paid extra you got video.

spitfire··on NBA broadcast rendered with volumetric video puts basketball in uncanny valley
Hah. Cool. I did this in 2003. I was building visual effects for nightclubs and raves… discovered that nightclubs and raves don’t pay.

Point a few cameras at a dancer Hugh voxel version was on the screen your could rotate bullet time like around.

spitfire··on A new wave of Linux applications
Interestingly NeXTStep (which became Apple) did it back in the 1991. http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/SWCatalogs/page274/page27... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_AppWrapper

Also, I remember back in 1996 when quake came out you could buy the shareware CD which came with all of IDs games locked. You called up a number and paid to get an unlock code. Very, very quickly a serial generator started floating around.

spitfire··on Is there any Printer that isn't broken and unfixable in less than a decade?
I'm still using a NeXT 400DPI Laser printer from 1990. The upside is that it's a software printer, so you get a NeXT Station/Cube as a print server.

Edit: It uses a Canon-SX engine and HP 95A cartridges - same as HP laser jet II/III and Apple laserwriter II. So parts and consumables are easily available.

Obviously the HP laser jets and apple laserwriters with network cards in them are also excellent choices.

spitfire··on The Gravis UltraSound (GUS) – early sampling snd card in spite of mismanaged biz
Greatest sound card of all. Lost to creative because of some of their underhanded business practices.

If you're picking one up now look for the ACE model. It's output only, and has much less interference than the regular models.

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