It's funny, I also read the book as a teen, and I came away from it amazed that IBM was dedicating entire team members to inter-/extra-team communication.
Before that I hadn't even considered how necessary a product manager or project manager were in software development.
But it was the "No Silver Bullet" essay added as a bonus in my copy that I think about the most. "Never again will we see a 10x productivity increase in a decade", this is self-evident now but must have been crushing to people who had experienced the first compilers, the first high-level languages, the first interactive terminals, and waited for the next incredible leap.
On older hardware such as this it could e.g. let you write a multitasking environment that supported shared libraries without use of an MMU (though you'd hit memory constraints pretty quickly on a Z80-era cpu!).
I'm not familiar with the instruction sets of the 6809 but I could also see more compact opcodes, e.g. a JMP with a relative offset can be encoded smaller than JMP with an absolute address.
In modern terms PIC is used for ASLR and is therefore a security requirement. Some arches (I'm most familiar with arm64) are entirely designed around PIC and you need extra hoops to do anything in absolute terms.
I clicked the "parent comment" link all the way to the submission, and opened the submission as well. Nothing mentions IP68. Which "we" is this goalpost coming from?
I wrote a Rabin—Karp implementation in ~2006 as part of the spam and threat scanning stack for the MX Logic mail service. It was incredibly performant, letting us test {n} bytes against an essentially unlimited number of string signatures in O(n) time.
Wait, really? That is surprisingly dark. That's lower than bare terrestrial soil and closer to worn asphalt, according to Wikipedia.
In photography, I've always used a rule of thumb that to expose the Moon properly, aim for daylight exposure. This makes sense to me because the Moon's illuminated by the same sun as us, at the same distance. Wikipedia confirms the impression.[1]
Now, how can that be true, and the Moon still have a lower albedo than much of the stuff on Earth? Is albedo not measuring what I think it is?
I don't think that's right. Sunlight is white in the atmosphere too. Scattering causes the sun, not the light, to look yellow, and so sunlight is thought of as yellow.
Scattering doesn’t really make the sun to appear yellow except when it’s low, behind a lot of air. When it’s above 30° or so it just looks blinding, neutral white (or non-blinding neutral white if there’s suitable cloud cover or other filter in front of it). Even though a lot of the blues are scattered around, the sun still looks just white when it’s high in the sky.
But when the sun does look yellow, its light is yellow too, that’s the definition of "looks yellow". And the golden hour paints everything in very iconic yellow-orange hues. The light as integrated over the whole sky is still white (modulo whatever’s scattered back into space), but the light that comes from the direction of the sun is clearly tinted yellow and the light from the rest of the sky is clearly tinted blue.
> But when the sun does look yellow, its light is yellow too, that’s the definition of "looks yellow".
Not quite; the sun is far away and is restricted to a tiny portion of the sky, but its light covers half the earth at a time. It is simultaneously true that the sun looks yellow and that the light we receive from it is white. It isn't the case that objects in direct sunlight are yellowed by that light; the yellow appearance when you look at the sun is something of an illusion.
> Even though a lot of the blues are scattered around, the sun still looks just white when it’s high in the sky.
Before that I hadn't even considered how necessary a product manager or project manager were in software development.
But it was the "No Silver Bullet" essay added as a bonus in my copy that I think about the most. "Never again will we see a 10x productivity increase in a decade", this is self-evident now but must have been crushing to people who had experienced the first compilers, the first high-level languages, the first interactive terminals, and waited for the next incredible leap.
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