I agree. The limited expressiveness in Go also worked as an advantage because of its simplicity. Additionally, as the article mentions, the lack of lambdas made the syntax less convenient. For me, it struck a good balance before generics and other features were added.
I switched back to Pixel after two years of using an iPhone recently. It’s got a lot better phone and text spam detection. I get 5-10 spam calls and texts a day. The iPhone got unusable.
In Italy it is 2,000 Euro, the current governement proposal is to raise it to 5,000 and there was a lot of debates about it (according to previous measures it should have become 1,000 Euro in 2023).
Germany - I believe - has no set limit, Greece has 500 Euro.
The anti-laundering (and anti-terrorism) usefulness of limiting the amount of cash per payment has some merit, but (IMHO) it won't affect at all the illegal transactions (to evade taxes and VAT), it is news of these days of an ex-member of the EU parliament arrested in Bruxelles (in connection with presumed bribes related to the Qatar football world championship) arrested and found in possession of around 600,000 Euro cash.
I thought it was the case in France, too, but as it turns out that's the limit only when one party is a company. There's no limit for transactions between individuals (with a few exceptions).
What an amazing track record from Joel Spolsky: Launched Fog Creek, then StackOverflow, Trello and now Glitch (which I think is the successor of Fog Creek)
Fog Creek renamed to Glitch as we transitioned from being a bootstrapped product-incubation lifestyle company to a single-product VC-backed startup. I think of the Fog Creek storybook closing with that rename, since Glitch always had a very different business focus, but technically (and perhaps culturally) they're of the same lineage.
In other Joel track record exploits, he's also our co-founder over at HASH.ai [1] and a driving force behind the Block Protocol [2][3]
hash.ai and the "block protocol" sound like crypto shams. Nice to see something different, although I feel like the branding really, really makes it seem like crypto.
I know this is wrong, but I also think patio11 is somewhat a product of the Business of Software forum (that in many ways is a precursor to this place) so extremely indirectly I credit Joel with still seeing Patrick on my timeline regularly.
Feel free to upgrade that to a very, very direct influence. In 2010 after I quit being a salaryman I wanted nothing other than to go into semi-retirement on Bingo Card Creator (“sip iced cocoa and play video games all day”).
A long-ranging conversation with Joel on, among other things, confluence of Catholic theology and the Talmud plus the memorable phrase “Shouldn’t you apply your skills to something which isn’t totally bullshit?” caused me to have a sharp reassessment of life and career goals, but for which it is unlikely I would have made a serious go of my consultancy, successfully launched my following few companies, or continued writing at anything like pace observed over the interval.
and Patrick, I can say that you were the first heavy influence on me that pushed me in the direction of solo entrepreneurship. From your writings and podcast I found Brennan Dunn, Amy Hoy, Jonathan Stark, Philip Morgan and others who have inspired me to choose and pursue my own path. Thanks for all that you’ve done, and I aspire to leave the kind of mark on the world that you have left.
In Italy too. They specifically developed an XML format for that, and each time you issue an invoice you have to (well, with some exceptions, but they are gradually removing all of them) send a copy to the revenue agency, which will forward it to the recipient (and keep a copy).
While it is a bit inconvenient, though, I don't think it is a bad idea. I am pretty sure it helps a lot making the life harder for people evading taxes, and to some extent the availability of a standard machine-readable format makes it easy to do accounting. My wife sells videocourses online and I developed a thing that automatically issues invoices as soon as people buy a product (with some human supervision, mainly to avoid the machine doing havoc is some exceptional situation happens; normally it is just "click a button to send the invoice"). The invoices are then automatically available to the accountant for doing accountant things.
Not sure it is a good idea. It might be more flexible when you issue an invoice and have to modify it, but first it would enable fraud, and second it would mean that you have to monitor incoming invoices to see if anything changed and account for that. I think it's better to ask people to just emit correct invoices: if you need to invoice a bit more you issue another one, if you need to invoice less you issue a credit note. If you can't do that you need to work on your business processes.
Is it so small because the OS basically had no drivers or interfaces, just bare CPU/RAM/peripheral messaging, and apps sent low-level binary messages directly to the hardware? More "EE" than "CS"?
The primary reason for the size was the amount of memory. The hardware address space was 64kB. It's a DOS so there were full set of system calls for file and directory handling.
Apple DOS 3.3 usually lived in $9600-$BFFF, which was the top of the semi-standard 48K RAM Apple II. So the whole thing was 10,752 bytes. That included a LUT to assist with disk nibble-byte conversions, I/O routines to read, write, and enumerate files and text streams, and a disk initialization routine.
The cold boot code lived in 256 bytes of ROM memory-mapped to $C600-$C6FF on the Slot 6 disk controller. It generated another copy of the LUT, read the first few sectors of the disk to a temporary RAM location, and jumped to it.
Every disk had to be at least partially readable by this 256-byte bootstrap code. This was why every disk-based copy protection scheme on the Apple II was doomed; disassemble what it read, and learn the scheme's secrets.
The original DOS was slow because it did an extra buffer copy while processing 256-byte sectors. Lots of people produced aftermarket fast DOS versions that removed the large initialization routine and replaced it with smarter in-place reading/writing code. This allowed the system to be ready to read or write the next interleaved sector on a track, rather than having to wait for the disk to complete a full rotation. I remember Diversi-DOS and DavidDOS. The video game Sheila included a fast DOS as well; my high school friends and I extracted it from the game and used it as our "daily driver" DOS.
Various routines in DOS 3.3 became de facto APIs. So you'd see random programs JSRing to $Axxx to do something with the disk. You could also send text commands to DOS 3.3 through this brilliant pair of hooks that let it intercept characters to/from the screen. I think the print routine was $FDF0 or thereabouts. Crucially, Applesoft BASIC used those two hooks, so BASIC was DOS-integrated that way.
And P-Code was never meant for an interpreter, Niklaus Wirth originally created it to ease the bootstrapping of Pascal into other systems, it was UCSD that made it popular beyond the original goal.
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