Odd Lots
- Jim Strickland found a site with some of the guldurndest CP/M-80 programming tools from the 80s and maybe earlier. Most of them aren’t familiar to me, and I don’t have a machine to run them on anymore. However, if you want any of the four releases of JRT Pascal, or Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M, well, dinner is served.
- And for dessert, here’s the x86 DOS collection, including Turbo Pascal 3.02, Turbo C 2.01, and all of the original IBM PC slipcase compilers that I’ve ever seen.
- Very nice if not especially new intro to Flash and SSDs, from AnandTech.
- Another, more recent piece on Flash over there. Remember that it’s a multiparter; read ’em all.
- Pete Albrecht sends word of a Death Star ball camera trending on IndieGogo right now. It’s a little like kite aerial photography without the kite.
- Amtrak has some new muscle: 8600 horses’ worth. I used to take Amtrak between Baltimore and NYC regularly when I worked for Ziff-Davis, and it was a wonderful thing. Now if I could only get a damned train between here and Denver… (Thanks to Bruce Baker for the link.)
- Wonderful volcano photo over at Wired, which again leads me to wonder what the trends are in volcanic activity over the past century or two. Are there really more eruptions, or are we just hearing more about the ones that happen? If you’ve ever seen a chart somewhere, please share.
- Ouch.
- Pertinent to my last Odd Lots: The correct term is “assortative,” according to linguist Michael Covington. “Preventive” and “assortative” are derived from the 4th principal parts of the Latin verbs “preventus” and “assortatus.” That’s actually more interesting, in a way, than assortative mating itself.
- The Great Lakes are now 88% covered in ice. We may not top the 1994 level (94%) nor 1979 (95%) this year, but unless things get a helluva lot warmer out east in the next month or so, we’re going to give them a very good run.
- Great perky guitar piece by Eric Johnson in the $1.29 MP3 pile over at Amazon.
- Also, my fourth favorite pop song evah, for only a buck.
- If you &*!## love science enough to believe the &*!## data, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that sugar will &*!## kill you. (Thanks to my very brilliant wife for the link.)
- The core of loving science, by the way, is questioning authority–and demanding that scientific authority be sane, calm, utterly honest, and absolutely without anger. (And so–need I say?–should the questioners.)
- Either red wine, aspirin, or both could help us beat certain types of cancer. The key may be not too much wine, and not too much aspirin.
- If this Onion piece makes you twitch even a little, well, good.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: geology · hardware · health · humor · music · photography · programming · software
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Re: “…sugar will &*!## kill you.”
“The man who tried to warn us about sugar”: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/diet-and-fitness/john-yudkin-the-man-who-tried-to-warn-us-about-sugar-20140212-32h03.html
The AnandTech article is from 2009. On my work system with a SSD boot/application drive I see the stutter/pause they are talking about so that is still very much an issue.
Still struggling with a decision to buy. Amazon took too long to process my order from last week and I canceled it. So much for Amazon Prime and their 2 day delivery promise. After 49 hours Amazon had not even processed the order. 🙁
I’m thinking a Crucial M500 480GB as my current OS drive uses 240GB and that would give me nearly 50% space.
Thanks,
I got a Samsung 840 120GB unit for my boot volume back in January 2013, and so far I haven’t noticed a lick of stutter or any other issues with it. I’m going to get a bigger one sometime between here and The Death of XP, and I’ll be watching for problems. The technology is still in its (relative) infancy, and whatever problems we have now are just going to be gone in another few years. I bought an early thumb drive (16MB!) in summer 2001, and it won’t read anymore, but I’m far from sure that the Flash has gone bad. It looks more like a driver problem, and the driver disk that came with it is long, long gone. I’m guessing that before my credits start to roll, hard drives as we know them today will be seen as…quaint, rather like floppies are now.
I would argue that the early problems mentioned in that 5-year-old AnandTech article (it was “pre-TRIM” for heaven’s sake) have largely gone. I’ve been running SSDs for several years now (my first was a pre-TRIM 128GB model bought in August 2009 — upgrading the firmware on that to support TRIM in Windows 7 was a bit sweat-inducing). If nothing else, the controller software is leaps and bounds better than that half a decade ago.
Currently on my main laptop I have two 512GB SSDs and on my Win8 ultrabook a cute little 240GB mSATA drive that I might upgrade to 480GB. Both of my wife’s laptops run SSDs. Never have I experienced the “stutter effect”, quite probably because I never fill my SSDs. Once they get to 80% full or so, it’s time to think about upgrading (or, equivalently, archiving stuff off). The only spinning disk drives I use are in a RAID configuration in my backup NAS.
I will also note that WinXP doesn’t support TRIM, so any idle garbage collection is going to have to be done via special code in the SSD controller. If you don’t have such an SSD, then you might suffer stutter issues during writes.
Cheers, Julian
On Amazon and their two-day promise, I too have seen the long processing time problem, but in all cases but one, the delivery was not delayed. On small orders, they seem to use Lasership a lot, and those people are like a cab service for small parcels. Amazing.
More photos of the new Amtrak train:
http://ct.eweek.com/r/?id=h6390cd0e,65999a8,65ec476&dni=106535336&rni=23827496&p1=02152014
Embarcadero’s Museum page also has an “Antique Software” section that allows you to get Turbo C, Turbo C++, and Turbo Pascal. To run them, try using FreeDOS in a VirtualBox VM.
Got excited with that tease about CP/M software, but the one item I would really like to find seems to have vanished in the mists of time.
My memory has failed me on JRT. Then I found the Wikipedia article with a quote from some guy… Duntemann. He mentioned it was a terrible compiler, which jibes with what I recall hearing about it at the time.
When TP 1.0 ads appeared in the Silicon Dry Gulch Gazette, I phoned the number (answered that day by one Philippe Kahn), and in the course of questioning him finally asked why I should believe that his $50 compiler would be different than the JRT $30 compiler. His reply was classic: “I suggest you wait until we raise the price to $600 and buy it then.” I drove to Scotts Valley–I lived in Aptos at the time–and bought it, then and there.