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Where's that huge vomit emoji when you need it...
Software Zen: delete this;
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This one?
🤮
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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That would be the one.
🤮
Yet another thing for Chris to filter out  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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OriginalGriff wrote: Garlic sweets
Blah blah blah.
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Just make sure they can't see the wrappers as you toss them into the trickster's bags, otherwise they can identify you for future retaliation.
There are no solutions, only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.
- Calvin (Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes)
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There used to be a garlic restaurant in Singapore that supplied garlic ice cream. I had small chunks of raw garlic in it, the contrast in flavours was most enjoyable.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I usually hand out chocolate-dipped Brussels Sprouts, but the garlic ones might save me a lot of preparation time.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Haven't most of us been through a few waves of pepper candy, whether piper or capsicum pepper based?
For years, there was an Asian imports shop in town, selling ginger candy so intense in taste that I always warned my guests when I had them available. My family and myself loved them! (The shop has been gone for a few years now, and I don't know where to find that sort anywhere near to where I live.)
We also love garlic. I do not recall any candy variant, but I certainly wouldn't reject it if I was offered a taste. Then again: Eating garlic cloves 'as is' is probably not too different. (The bad thing with garlic goes by the old saying: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. A garlic a day keeps everybody away.)
Lots of cheeses are rather sweet without any sugar added. I love strong, well matured cheese: For a lot of cheese, I read 'Best Before:' as 'Best half a year after:'. Some people love to eat jam with their well matured cheese. Then we are getting closer to candy. While I cannot imagine adding sugar (or even jam) to my cheese, I can certainly imagine some taste elements from my favorite well matured cheeses used in a mix with other taste elements in a 'generic' candy. Not to make the candy taste 'like cheese', but to bringing in some of the strong taste elements that I love.
Some years ago, a jelly candy was introduced, announcing '1023 different tastes!'. Being a computer guy, my immediate reaction was: Isn't that one short? Shouldn't it be 1024? Then it dawned upon me: They have a basic jelly candy, and 10 different taste elements that can be added or not added. The 1024th, or rather 0th, taste is when none of the ten taste elements are added. A completely no-taste jelly candy. They omitted that alternative from the taste options. (The candy was short-lived, so I do not remember neither its name or manufacturer.)
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I love ginger sweets.
I have used them to qualify for free shipping.
Kids might find them spicy.
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Jeff Duntemann just released the 4th ed of his fantastic assembly language book and I've started reading it.
x64 Assembly Language Step-By-Step: Programming With Linux[^]
I read the first edition of this book way back in '93[^]. It was sitting on a shelf at work and no one had read it. This book has quite a lot of history in it and it's a really great read.
The author was the first who helped me understand math in different number bases. He does a great job of explaining things simply.
Have any of you read any versions of the book? It's a great read.
It's interesting to follow a book for over 30 years. Wow!
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I was introduced to number bases (mainly hex) back in 1965, in my first week as a computer operator on a LEO III(computer) - Wikipedia[^] system. And because of our currency at the time it was designed to handle monetary values that contianed 1 to 11 pence, in 1 to 19 shillings per pound sterling. Truly a great machine.
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Wow! That's very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Very cool you are still active in computers & tech.
That's the very cool thing about IT, computers & tech it is constantly changing so you can just keep on working with it without ever getting bored.
It's been a wild ride for me and I started after the "mainframe" epoch and was more a part of the PC epoch - seeing DOS machines turn into Windows 3 machines, then Windows 95 & NT, etc.
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I made the switch when the first IBM PC and its many clones started to appear on our workspaces. And yes, it's (mainly) been fun, especially learning new languages, frameworks etc.
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As I recall, Jeff made a comment about IBM struggling with OS/2. "Every time they turn the corner, there is another corner". That was many years ago.
Back in 1965, our computers had limited storage so everything was in Assembler language.
Well, for the eggheads, there was Fortran, with overlays to disk at 10 BPF (Bytes Per Fortnight).
>64
Some days the dragon wins. Suck it up.
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theoldfool wrote: IBM struggling with OS/2
That was the last time I did any serious assembly language programming. I wrote an OS/2 device driver for a piece of custom hardware. 18,000 lines of assembler later...
Software Zen: delete this;
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An 18,000 line driver in those days? That sounds rather extreme, for a driver.
I mean, after Bill Gates had granted 640K of the 1M address space for application code, which should be enough for everybody, only 384K is left for the OS and drivers. Most instructions take up 2 or 3 bytes. Assuming that most of your 18,000 lines were instructions, then your driver would alone fill something like 10% of the total system space in RAM!
Admittedly: I never studied half an OS. The memory limits were probably less constrained than in DOS - but the physical memory was still limited in those days, and for the most parts, drivers need to stay resident.
Sidetrack: It is a long time since I heard to old professor emeritus'es referred to as 'TSRs'. Young people of today never learned that term. 
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OS/2 had more memory than DOS.
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On a given processor / hardware?
Or because the designers decided that less than 640 K would be enough for everybody?
OS/2 certainly didn't predate large-machine virtual memory, but am fairly convinced that it did predate widespread hardware support for virtual memory management on the x86 architecture.OS/2 was designed to run at pre-386 architectures, wasn't it? Correct me if I am wrong!
Nevertheless, an 18,000 lines driver for a PC was rather massive at that time!
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trønderen wrote: OS/2 certainly didn't predate large-machine virtual memory, but am fairly convinced that it did predate widespread hardware support for virtual memory management on the x86 architecture. OS/2 was designed to run at pre-386 architectures, wasn't it? Correct me if I am wrong!
OS/2 1.x could run on an 80286, and could run a single instance of DOS programs (non-multitasked). It had segment-level virtual memory (swapping out entire segments at a time). OS/2 2.x and later ran on 80386 and above, used the page-level virtual memory system, and could run multiple instances of DOS (multitasked).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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OS/2 Warp 3.0 and later supported a large amount of RAM in a linear, 32-bit address space. Our machines at the time had 16 to 64 MB.
The driver was large because the hardware was complex and needed to support many operations in near real-time. As a result, a lot of what you might normally think of as application functionality was implemented in the driver.
Software Zen: delete this;
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theoldfool wrote: Well, for the eggheads, there was Fortran, with overlays to disk at 10 BPF (Bytes Per Fortnight).
Makes me think of the old 1958 vintage 'GIER' machine, of Danish manufacture - already a museum item when I was a student. (It has an entry in the Norwegian Wikipedia at Wikipedia: Gier[^] but unfortunately no English version is available). This machine had an optical paper tape reader, reading 3000 characters/sec.
We were told that when this this machine were still in regular operation, it was kept as a secret by the insiders why there was a yellow tape on the floor in front of the machine, with another yellow tape line crossing it. The secret was that the cross marked where you should place the basket to catch the paper tape as it shot out of the reader.
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I didn't read that book.
But I did learn it, because Assembly still was part of the topics in college for me in 2000-2002.
That's what helped me getting good really fast at LAD in PLC programming. Not the same, but similar enough.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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When I was teaching various aspects of programming and data communication at a Tech College in the early 1990s, we saw it as essential that the programming students had at least some understanding of what happened to their programs after being compiled. So I taught a course in elementary computer architecture - the ideas of ALU functions, registers, busses, instruction and addressing formats ... No implementation technology, only those aspects relevant to the software developer.
In this course, homework assignments were x86 assembly coding. (I lost the battle to get some 68K machines to the college, which would have been a great advantage in teaching clean, non-messy architectures. But I lost.) We certainly did not intend to teach the students assembly as a viable development tool; its primary purpose was to give them a 'hands on' feeling of the implications and limitations of a processor architecture. I still believe that this is The Essential Aspect of learning assembler coding: To understand what a CPU is really like. You can take advantage of that understanding when writing high level code.
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We used 68008 for programming a self built computer. CPU, memory,EProm (UV erase), RS-232 serial port. circa 1988.
I remember one lab where they forced us to use 3 levels of subroutines where each level used a different parameter passing approach. pass by value, then by pointer, then by pointer to pointer.
From version 1 to version 20 that finally worked I might have had one op code different.
Really makes you understand and appreciate how the higher level languages work.
For example, if you do not understand pointers, then there is no way you understand Java object “references”.
68000 LEA op code is stuck in my brain forever!
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I had the second edition but lost that in a fire. I bought the third edition and still have that, and tomorrow I will have the 4th edition!
I've followed Jeff since his PC Tech Journal (Magazine) and Delphi (Pascal) days.
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