asciilifeform: time to think^H blink << 'The lights must never go out, The music must always play..., Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night, Who have never been happy or good.'
asciilifeform: (brittle as all fuck, cannot tolerate lateral force much at all)
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: glass scalpel << of late i have made much use of carbide cutting tools on lathe, which come with similar warnings.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that particular piece was written while waiting for a locked-up msword turd on a usg slavemachine, also running mandatory usg antivirus, which wedged the disk
asciilifeform: (extracted chemically at bowel-loosening expense)
asciilifeform: for folks outside of usa, good story re: Al: in washington d.c., there is an enormous obelisk, 'washington monument.' it is tipped with a small pyramid of precious aluminum.
asciilifeform: there was a plethora of interestingly-different machine architectures.
asciilifeform: for instance, in the '70s, when there was an understanding that a computer is purchased and comes with own os, and your own men will write literally everything else (often including os) that will ever run on it, until it goes to the scrapyard -
asciilifeform: catch is, you have to... burn the world.
asciilifeform: except, unlike petrogoodies, it is possible to get design space back just by 'wanting enough.'
asciilifeform: in many ways it behaves like a non-renewable mineral resource.
asciilifeform: in some of my articles, i mention a concept called 'design space.' it, approximately, means, the set of engineering decisions that are thinkable at a given time.
asciilifeform: point is, it is possible to build electronics that are actually programmable.
asciilifeform: decimation: there could be room found for an entire period reproduction of intel 486, for when the mood to play 'doom' strikes you.
asciilifeform: an imaginary animal that lives in the skulls of folks who talk about 'close to the hardware? that means c of course'
asciilifeform: i could go on, but this could fill a book.
asciilifeform: (intel tried shipping a gizmo without it, now it is known affectionately as 'the itanic')
asciilifeform: e.g., translation lookaside buffer cache on intel.
asciilifeform: so if an idiot tells you that 'c' is 'naturally close to platonic hardware' - you have my official blessing (tm) to kick his face in.
asciilifeform: extant cpu archs are quite unlike pdp-10. internally, of course. 90+% of the Si real estate is then used up in papering over this to build a convincing simulacrum of 'c' machine.
asciilifeform: and it takes a supercomputer, of a kind not even yet built, to write a word processor where there are no palpable delays when entering a character. if you believe microshit.
asciilifeform: cargo-cult imitation of real computer.
asciilifeform: butbutbutt... it could be on a locked nfs volume! it could be on an abacus wielded by retarded child! etc
asciilifeform: folks who realize this, eventually 'turn perelman'
asciilifeform: most of what programmers do, is really grunt labour to work around the mistakes of earlier programmers.
asciilifeform: decimation: this sounds like top-grade batshit to 'civilians', who don't normally understand how simple (from algorithmic standpoint) everything they usually want out of the machine, really is
asciilifeform: thestringpuller: guess how much i and everybody i knew paid.
asciilifeform: under rusty old msdos one can, generally, actually program in c
asciilifeform: easier to write c-code in linux than say DOS << beg to differ.
asciilifeform: mostly pure zoological revulsion at microshit
asciilifeform: the point, when there is a point, generally has nothing to do with reading
