I hope my brain is also different. I also have never spent hours scrolling through short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, Facebok, etc. I never ever walk outside with my phone in my hand, instead enjoying the view.
I do enjoy watching YouTube videos at home, on the living-room flatscreen, on a variety of topics, but I select them manually, one at a time, from the vast selection The Algorithm(TM) offers me, plus my own searches.
My understanding is that those who work with the mentally handicapped use bright lights and other stimuli to soothe and control them. It is also my understanding that the autistic are stimulated by vibrant colors (coughcoughMy Little Ponycoughcough).
Who is to say that the rest of us are not also vulnerable to such controlling stimuli?
China is now the second country, and third entity after SpaceX and Blue Origin, to recover a booster after launching a payload to orbit. While its predecessors use landing legs, the Chinese rocket uses a wire net to catch the booster.
>I spent a day or so traveling through Germany with my parents a few weeks ago as part of a (much longer) trip and a common refrain during that day was, "So much for German efficiency."
I've heard it said that the idea that Germans are efficient is a myth. (The new Berlin airport is one example.)
>But even as an Englishman, it was very different to home. I remember the supermarket was shut all Sunday and was only open until 12 on the Saturday, and it shut early in the week too (at like 5pm or 6pm or something?) so by the time I'd got the train back home from work it was already closed. I had to get up early every Saturday just to make sure I could get the shopping done.
If it were the Anglosphere that had very restrictive laws about store hours/days of operation, and Germany/Austria with pretty much unlimited hours, this would be the #1 topic brought up in any online discussion whatsoever about the US/UK/etc. But because of DACH's smaller cultural visibility, it isn't brought up nearly so often in actuality.
The full manual cover photo at the top of the page shows that it was published by Optimized Systems Software for Atari.
I think most Atari users interested in C or C-like programming would have, instead of a C interpreter like Tiny-C, used a) Deep Blue C <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Blue_C>, or b) Action! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language)>. Both are compilers with complete library support to Atari hardware features; as I understand it, they are superior to any high-level language available for Commodore 64, and comparable to the various BASIC compilers for Apple II such as Microsoft's TASC.
> Isn’t this a similar argument to how Africa adopted mobile phones significantly faster than other regions?
You didn't read the article:
>Africa’s internet infrastructure is not fit for purpose. During a communications boom in the early 2000s, the continent eschewed fixed-line internet for cheaper mobile broadband; today more than 400m Africans, the bulk of the continent’s users, gain access to the internet this way.
>But the technology has not kept pace with the rapid increase in data demand from streaming and AI-powered applications.
If you don't want to believe me that Apple's drives worked and Tandy's didn't, consider why VisiCalc launched on the Apple II in 1979 despite Bricklin and Frankston intending to do so on the Model I,[1] because of the latter's far greater market share.
[1] Not only that, Dan Fylstra (founder of VisiCalc publisher Personal Software) was among the first people in the world to own the Commodore PET and the Model I, having reviewed both for BYTE
> I mean, in 1978 Tandy used standard drives and a disk controller IC, and still managed to sell a whole 16K TRS-80 system with disk drive for the same price
The Tandy products were utter garbage.
Controller = Unreliable. Expansion Interface required for the controller = So unreliable that a robust third-party alternative market developed, including Steve Ciarcia's version. TRSDOS = So unreliable that Tandy has the dubious distinction of being the 8-bit system with the most third-party operating systems.
Reliability greatly improved from the Model III onward, but by then it was too late: Tandy had a) destroyed its reputation (the "Trash-80" nickname did not come out of nowhere) and b) surrendered its colossal market lead to the tiny startup founded by two California college dropouts.
... which is still significantly slower than the Disk II.
The 1978 Disk II is about 30 times faster than the unaccelerated 1982 Commodore 1540/1541, as well as more reliable,[1] cooler-running,[2] and just more elegantly designed. The same comparison holds for the 4040 and other pre-1541 Commodore drives, albeit with the speed disadvantage vis-a-vis Apple being less.[3]
[1] The 1541's drive head often goes out alignment despite both it and Disk II using similar "ratatatat" methods to return to the first track. Also, the first couple of years of 1541 production were notorious for failures in general.
[2] As the 1541 is a standalone 6502-based computer with an integrated power supply, overheating is constantly an issue.
[3] Yes, the 1541 is slower than earlier Commodore drives, because of the move from parallel to serial IEEE-488 and a hardware bug (that both necessitated and allows for Fast Load and its counterparts)
>Commodore disk drives (4040 and so on) actually use a very similar approach. There's no FDC controller chip and the 6502 is hooked to the drive (literally the same SA-390 as Apple used) via simple hardware.
I disagree that the approaches are similar. The 4040 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_4040> is a monstrosity; even the later single-drive models, such as the 1541, are massive. Apple's 1978 floppy drive + Disk II card takes up less space than 1985's 1571 drive (and still significantly faster).
>The only significant difference is that the 6502 (actually two of them) is in a separate enclosure from the Pet , communicating via IEEE-488.
Many things are possible when another 6502 is used just for the drives! That Commodore takes this approach is, as I said, no credit to its army of engineers versus one Berkeley dropout.
>Since Commodore manufactured the 6502 presumably it was ok to use them liberally.
I acknowledge that, had Apple been the owner of MOS and manufactured 6502s, it might also have been tempted to take the easy way out designwise and built Commodore-style drives, or implement the Disk II with a 6502 on it. But I'd like to think that Woz would have done the "right" thing regardless of available resources.
As zellyn said, Disk II is pure genius writ large.
It's flabbergasting how good Woz's designs were. Almost on a whim, he with the Disk II did something no one anywhere in Silicon Valley—anywhere in the world—was doing. Forget about IBM, HP, Shugart, Tandon. Just within Commodore and Tandy, Apple's direct 1977 competitors, there were abundant human and engineering resources to come up with a fast, inexpensive, and reliable floppy drive and controller; Chuck Peddle at Commodore was certainly no average engineer. And yet, Commodore was still unable to do this in 1984.
Whether one believes in the reality of the existence of the "10X developer", it's hard not to see what Woz did between 1976 and 1978—Integer BASIC, Apple II color graphics, and Disk II—as proof that such a being can exist, even if (as I have written elsewhere) that brilliance straddled the line between optimized and overoptimized. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41685888>
My UnRAID server has been up for more than a month, and would be much longer were it not for a system update there, too. The uptime of the VMs on the server are also affected by this.
>Staff working in the building told Euractiv that the air conditioning failure did not affect the floors above level 8, where Ursula von der Leyen, her European commissioners and their cabinets are based.
