“Calls to the Toolbox and Operating System via the trap dispatch table are implemented by means of the MC68000's "1010 emulator" trap. To issue such a call in assembly language, you use one of the trap macros defined in the macro files. When you assemble your program, the macro generates a trap word in the machine-language code. A trap word always begins with the hexadecimal digit $A (binary 1010); the rest of the word identifies the routine you're calling, along with some additional information pertaining to the call.”
It is written very strangely. It's not exactly like they reached the decision to use F-line traps for co-processors, I'm pretty sure F-line traps were designated by Motorola for co-processors, and A-line traps were free for use for OS and Toolbox trap instructions.
The "software crashed expecting a co-processor" part doesn't make any sense either, you were always supposed to check if a co-processor was available. There was no big rug pull or anything, both the first models and some later models simply did not have co-processors. Developers were provided this information.
And the last two sentences seem completely unrelated to the prior ones, so I'm not really sure what they're trying to string together.
I'll try to repro. I think with System 7 and on a lot of improvements were made to the OS (things like an Extensions manager comes to mind). Perhaps we're remembering those better days.
At the same time, it took me a while to unlearn a kind of reflexive <command>-S muscle spasm that I think twitched about every 4 or 5 minutes.
Yes. It had an ugly UI and preemptive multitasking, but it didn't have memory protection and -- unlike MultiFinder -- didn't clean up after apps for certain resources, so you'd eventually need to reboot to get those resources back even if your system remained stable.
Netscape was crashy everywhere. I finally switched to IE in ~2000 despite being a die-hard Microsoft hater, because DoubleClick shipped some code that would hang Netscape and as a result the whole Internet broke.
Yeah, the main issue was the lack of memory protection on Mac so the crashes could take down the whole machine. I switched to NT4 though that had drawbacks of its own.
iOS has very strict process/resource management because it wants to preserve both available RAM (for responsiveness) and your battery life. I wouldn't call it cheating (even in jest); it's a very deliberately and carefully designed feature of the OS.
Sure, and that's fair, but to me the "cheating" is more about how it is limited to only certain types of computing. On a Mac, or indeed any non-Apple OS since Windows 3.1, you've been able to for instance, start a long-running, resource-intensive process like encoding a video, minimize that window, and open say, Minesweeper or read a text file for an hour, all knowing that the OS wouldn't dare interfere with your background task. In iOS you can be assured that the moment you background an app, iOS can and will send something to kill it at any minute, and there's not even a way to explicitly allow a certain app to be immune from being killed, even on a one-time basis.
All of this is totally by design (and thinking only of phone handsets I'm sure some people would defend this), but it is maybe the #1 thing that prevents this otherwise capable hardware from being used for more things. (Not to mention how much it hamstrings iPad OS).
This was most certainly not the case when using CD burners in windows 9x. I remember my friend being afraid of even moving the mouse while burning a CD.
most people just want a phone, to check email, watch a youtube video, check tiktak, etc. they don't want to do serious computing on their phone. I'm in that crowd. I have more computers than you can throw a stick at, I don't need that out of my phone.
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
It's also an outrage how much leverage companies have over their H1B employees (especially from India, etc).
If you have any long-term H1B coworkers from less-favored nations, I guarantee you there's a heartbreaking story they have to tell you if you ask.
I work with a super high-performing guy with a Masters degree who has been at my company for 15 years and gets treated super poorly by the company. He still is probably 10 years away from getting a naturalization interview and has no hope of switching jobs in the meantime (and has children that are citizens...).
If they have direct family members that are citizens they should skip the wait apply through the family path, although they would need to be on good terms with said family member as they have to vouch for their welfare payments for 10 years
At least it that way about a decade ago, as I’m realizing things might have changed since then
The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".
> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.
If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.
This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.
And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.
1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.
Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.
I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.
I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.
There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.
(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.
Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?
Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.
I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.
*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.
that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.
and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.
100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.
I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.
The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.
If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.
Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
You would be surprised how hard can some managers negotiate 10% salary change during hiring, despite the fact its not their own money, or anyhow useful for their work. I talk multinational mega corporations here. People just want to be good employees(TM) or at least seen as such.
At large tech companies, the pay is entirely driven by level and rating; so there's no savings in salary; just added costs to comply with the directive.
It's endlessly frustrating that the US government wants to centrally plan my hiring decisions.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
H1b isn't about "experts", there are other visas for that (eb1 or o1). H1b's purpose it to find talent after search has been "exhausted" locally. That is rarely done in good faith.
It is a problem with the DMCA because the DMCA makes companies do this to CYA because your apple purchase might be circumventing copyright and it's easier just to assume it applies to everything than to narrow it to actual copyright violations. It is a very bad law, it should never have been written, and it, not Obamacare, should be repealed.
I don't think it's quite the same thing as "everything is a file". Unix files are typeless byte streams. Ruby objects have actual structure and type, and being able to do, for example, `49.times {print "this is a time!"}` because integers are objects doesn't add any friction to your life.
However one isn't inherently less abstract than the other.
For example, while objects may have 'structure and type'. They don't have an inherent byte representation, so one could argue they are even more abstract.
While I understand that objective-c has clear heritage from smalltalk, this comparison always struck me as farcical. Objective-C yields very few of the benefits of a proper Smalltalk VM outside of message passing, and i suppose some of the syntax. Meanwhile the burden of having to deal with C is absolutely staggering in comparison to the benefits.
Oh, absolutely—this wasn't meant as a value judgement. I've written my fair share of objective-c for this very reason (well, that and wanting to write native GUIs ages ago). I'm just saying the parallels between it and smalltalk are highly exaggerated.
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