Smalltalk-80 was also good for graphics programming.
Around 1990, I was a graduate student in Prof. Red Whittaker's field robotics group at Carnegie Mellon. In Porter Hall, I was fortunate to have a Sun 3/60 workstation on my desk. It had a Smalltalk-80. I learned to program it using Goldberg & Robson and other books from ParcPlace Systems.
The programming environment was fantastic, better than anything I have seen before or since. You always ran it full screen, and it loaded up the Smalltalk image from disk. As the article says, you were in the actual live image. Editing, running, inspecting the run-time objects, or debugging: all these tasks were done in the exact same environment. When you came into the office in the morning, the entire environment booted up immediately to where you had left it the previous day.
The image had objects representing everything, including your screen, keyboard, and mouse. Your code could respond to inputs and control every pixel on the screen. I did all my Computer Graphics assignments in Smalltalk. And of course, I wrote fast video games.
I used the system to develop programs for my Ph.D thesis, which involved geometric task planning for robots. One of the programs ran and displayed a simulation of a robot moving in a workspace with obstacles and other things. I had to capture many successive screenshots for my papers and my thesis.
Everybody at CMU then wrote their papers and theses in Scribe, the document generation system written by Brian Reid decades earlier. Scribe was a program that took your markup in a plain text file (sort of at a LaTeX level: @document, @section, etc.) and generated Postscript for the printer.
I never had enough disk space to store so many full screen-size raster images. So, of course, instead of taking screenshots, I modified my program to emit Postscript code, and inserted it into my thesis. I had to hack the pictures into the Postscript generation process somehow. The resulting pictures were vector graphics using Postscript commands. They looked nice because they were much higher resolution than a screenshot could have been.
My understanding is no, if I understand what people mean by systolic arrays.
GreenArray processors are complete computers with their own memory and running their own software. The GA144 chip has 144 independently programmable computers with 64 words of memory each. You program each of them, including external I/O and routing between them, and then you run the chip as a cluster of computers.
How do you use qpdf for extraction when its README states “qpdf does not render PDFs or perform text extraction, and it does not contain higher-level interfaces for working with page contents.”
Not the person you're replying to, but when they said "extraction" I believe they're talking about extracting pages from a PDF (like "splitting" the PDF apart, page-wise), not text. At least that's a thing I've used qpdf for in the past.
Which is also what the "extract" button does in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC for Professional Enterprise Customers or whatever they're calling it now, so it's arguably a term of art for PDFs.
(2) is just a typo but as for (1) “metal–organic” correctly uses an en dash, and this is quite nice to see. They're consistently using the en dash even in their tweets etc, which is lovely.
Probably written by Swedish persons, we also use -s suffixes in many places but basically never with apostrophes so using them when writing English can be a bit hard to get correct (and vice-versa going back to Swedish it's easy to add them in the wrong places).
1. Very few people these days understand the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. And then converting fonts and character sets on the internet adds another layer of error generation. We could settle on using a single '-' for hyphen and en-dash and a ' -- ' for em-dashes in fonts that don't have a ligature, but that hasn't carried down from the typewriter days for some reason. Microsoft Word is probably a big part of why.
Thanks for posting. Long video, but at about the 12-minute mark he says something about warranty work, relevant to TFA. He says that the hourly rate for any work done under warranty is set artificially low by the manufacturer.
Say a dealership would normally charge a customer $200 an hour for a job, of which the technician will make about $50 an hour. But if the same work is done under warranty, i.e., the manufacturer is paying, the dealership will get only $100 an hour. The dealership, in turn, will reduce the technician's pay to less than $50. Thus, the manufacturer is squeezing the dealership, which is squeezing the tech.
Good point. The article does acknowledge this aspect, but it notes one important thing that was true in the 1950s and is no longer true:
> The business world of the 1950s and 1960s was a clubby, inbred place and its apotheosis was the boardroom — especially the bank boardroom. The country’s biggest banks populated their boards with chief executives from a wide range of industries in order to keep tabs on the economy. When they gathered around a conference table, the executives tended to agree on matters large and small.
This establishment had many bad aspects, including racism and sexism, but the result was a unified front, and they couldn't be bullied so easily by an out-of-control president.
This all changed with shareholder capitalism, with every company for itself. As a result, they can no longer stand up to Trump.
> Trevor Milton, who founded Nikola in 2014... lied about nearly every aspect of the hydrogen-fueled-truck company’s business... he was convicted... Milton received a pardon from President Trump this year, which also means he no longer has to pay restitution to investors who lost money on Nikola. Milton and his wife donated $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign in October.
Is the above kind of graft also par for the course, or is it unprecedented?
Beautiful! I love the clean design of the page, too. I went through a period of obsession with the Harel paper, and your page is a nice summary of some of the key points!
Suggestion: separate out the fiction writing advice from the nonfiction. Today they're mixed together, and their audiences are often non-overlapping.
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