Comments by "Peter Lund" (@peterfireflylund) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. There are two standard ways of pronouncing “niche” in English — one sounds French-ish and the other sounds like “nitch”. Both are considered correct.
    2
  2. Wiktionary will usually have both IPA and a sound sample or two. The IPA would have made it abundantly clear that Zeiss doesn’t begin with a voiced s...
    2
  3.  @georgegonzalez2476  the S/360 did have memory protection! What it did not have (originally) was virtual memory. That was added later. The original protection was key-based: each 4k page had a 4-bit number associated with it and each running program had a 4-bit number associated with it. These numbers had to be the same (or one of them had to be zero) for access to a given page to be allowed. (I wrote most of an S/360 emulator last year.)
    2
  4.  @georgegonzalez2476  the 12-bit offsets are not a problem, btw. The offsets are used to access fields inside structures and very few structures get bigger than 4k.
    2
  5.  @NUCLEARARMAMENT  figuring out how to parcel work between the processors in the Cell is nothing like throwing some SSE code into a C program (or asking the compiler to do it for you).
    2
  6. Well, that aged badly.
    2
  7.  @youxkio  Spinoza and Huygens (Christian, not the other one) are long-time favorites of mine and I know Baruch was born there. Still, I don’t really think the Dutch can claim him as truly theirs.
    2
  8.  @youxkio  Spinoza absolutely would have called The Netherlands his home, but what I mean is that it wasn’t so much the Dutch culture that produced his genius. The spark came from the outside and the Dutch thankfully didn’t snuff it out as the Portuguese would have. (The Portuguese had pretty good reasons to be against Jews, though, so I’m not going to blame them for that.)
    2
  9. The smart Arabs (who were mostly Christian) left or were chased out. And the dumbest/poorest ones suddenly had lots of surviving kids, so that part of the population exploded. The (smart, Christian) Arabs are doing very, very well in Latin America now. Probably not the explanation you would prefer to hear — and it’s not the whole explanation. Unfortunately, it’s not wrong.
    2
  10. The problem is that lots of people get the degree without the talent. They now believe they deserve a nice indoor job in an office with air conditioning and a high salary, preferably without too much hard work. There aren't enough of those jobs, especially not for the people who have a degree but not the talent. There isn't anything the government can do to get all of them a nice job. Some of them, yes, but far from all of them.
    2
  11.  @Asianometry  I believe Japanese DRAM was cheaper than US DRAM and just as good or better. NEC’s CPUs were also pretty good. I think Japan also had better and cheaper LCDs at the time. And the US did try hard to block imports from Japan, claiming that Japan sold these products below cost.
    2
  12.  @r0galik utter paranoid schizophrenic bollocks!
    1
  13. Thank you! I was wondering if it was the same Dolphin.
    1
  14. He talked about them in another video a year or two ago.
    1
  15.  @FOLIPE isn’t Embraer the only successful tech company in Brazil, ever?
    1
  16.  @poofygoof the bswap instruction is fast (and old).
    1
  17. Funny how those “problems” only manifested in the US…
    1
  18. It was much more expensive than ATI at the time.
    1
  19. They were still known for their high quality. It was one of the few companies that weren’t utterly destroyed by Communism, perhaps because they were allowed more independence because they earned so much foreign currency?
    1
  20.  @lyricaltokarev4747 have you ever heard of kerning? If not, today is your lucky day!
    1
  21.  @zenlei8258  there is more money in medicine and finance these days.
    1
  22. Minx? Kuráy?
    1
  23. That joke was of course made all the time back then. You can still find all articles from The Register with it.
    1
  24.  @stonward  I wouldn’t. Did Greece liberate itself?
    1
  25. The 68K had ridiculous addressing modes — and then the 68020 got even more of them! Both instruction sets were kinda hard to decode. But, hey, Amiga forever, right?
    1
  26. Was it (and the Bombe machines) actually destroyed? No. Some of them were but the rest were kept… because that allowed GCHQ to decode encrypted messages from other countries. The Germans were not the only ones with interesting encrypted messages… (That some of these machines survived is officially out in the open now but it was kept secret for years.)
    1
  27.  @parkerbond9400  still the only religion that has a country.
    1
  28.  @Loggus66  the Vatican has soldiers in funny clothes and Special Red Slippers for the pope. And a popemobile, of course!
    1
  29. Karel Gott’s cover (in German!) of Paint it Black is amazing!
    1
  30. Austro-Hungarian.
    1
  31. The problem is huge in Denmark... and it is getting worse with all the "qualified cultural enrichment" we have been having more and more of. The government changes the grading scale here twice, first in a visible way that made it hard to compare grades before and after. Later in a hidden way that most of the population hasn't caught on to even though it is right there in the law that changed the grading scale. The result is that grades look high despite an actual palpable quality decline... and the ceiling of the scale is also much lower now so lots of people are happy that they get "top grades".
    1
  32.  @gregorymalchuk272  I know. The Elbrus was worse. A lot worse.
    1
  33. Wasn’t he a Portuguese Jew?
    1
  34. East Asians have a right shifted IQ distribution, so they can handle "college for all!" (and "high school for all!") better than the US and Europe. Apart from that, I agree entirely.
    1
  35.  @MrMakabar  What you are really saying is that reliable external examinations would be useful. Why should the teaching be coupled to the (no longer so reliable) examinations?
    1
  36. The list of wasted subsidies is much longer than the list of successes.
    1
  37. Shoulda googled more names. You did ok with the two you googled and butchered easy ones like "Harz Mountains" and "Otto von Guericke".
    1
  38. And DRAM like a Klingon.
    1
  39.  @oo-fn6gp  Nissan was mismanaged and practically bankrupt. That’s why so much if it is owned by Renault today. Renault saved Nissan with money, know how, and competent management. There is nothing sinister about that, no dirty back room deals, nothing shady. What is shady, though, is how Japan is trying to steal Nissan back!
    1
  40. Why the surprise? I thought it was common knowledge? She was actually a really good Prime Minister, no matter how big the red smear campaign against her was (and still is).
    1
  41.  @chinguunerdenebadrakh7022  it’s really hard when a large share of the voters have swallowed the anti-nuclear lies, when all major news media propagate it, and when there was a big risk of losing voters to the “green” party (and the communist party) in the next elections. It was and is one of the few areas where the German state TV doesn’t blindly support whoever is in charge in Berlin.
    1
  42. And really nice and general addressing modes. Before the 386, there were annoying limitations on which registers you could combine (and how) to form a memory address. The 386 instruction set was much more orthogonal than the 86/186/286 instruction sets… but the encoding was of course not nice and orthogonal.
    1
  43.  @holmybeer  no, I’m talking about the ability to write [eax+ecx*4+1234], which works fine in real mode, btw. Before the 386, you could only use a few specific register in address calculations (bx, bp, si, di). If you wanted to access something on the stack, you almost had to use [bp+disp] (which conveniently defaulted to using the stack segment). You couldn’t write ss:[sp+disp] so you were basically forced to use bp as the frame pointer.
    1
  44.  @jkobain ”dram” :(
    1