>I also was unable to ever learn my multiplication tables.
>I don't have a learning disability
Maybe you don't have a learning disability, but you definitely seem like you have some sort of mental block that is preventing you from being able to learn certain things. Maybe things you consider boring, and you can't focus enough on them to get past them?
Could you draw overlapping things without repainting using 1985 technology?
That is, an IBM PC running at 4.77 MHz; with 128 KB of ram (or 640 KB if you're lucky). The OS would have been dos at something like version 2.x
Some people[1] used Wordstar as their text editor.
You had limited multitasking -- TSRs maybe.
I'm not sure what programming language they used but possibly Microsoft C and assembly.
To add a little more color to this, you had to be able to quickly repaint just a region of a window. And you don't have a bitmap of the window's current contents because that takes up RAM and you'd need CPU time to update a copy every time the window updates (slowing down any animations).
I don't know how it's handled these days, but when I was first playing around with Win32, you'd receive events telling you a region of your window was invalidated. You were expected to figure out what controls and images belonged in that region and just repaint those items because of the CPU load.
Sure, because that was the obvious standard technique in 1996. But for it to become the standard, someone first had to invent it. (And Swing in 1996 probably ran slower than Mac OS in 1986, despite Moore's Law.)
We use some special tricks for searches that are executed
frequently, e.g. as part of a dashboard. (We’ll describe
this in a future article.)
And...
(You might wonder why we store log messages in this
4K-paged, metadata-and-text format, rather than
working with raw log files directly. There are many
reasons, which boil down to the fact that internally,
the Scalyr log engine looks more like a distributed
database than a file system. Text searches are often
combined with database-style filters on parsed log
fields; we may be searching many thousands of logs at
once; and simple text files are not a good fit for our
transactional, replicated, distributed data
management.)
It sounds like they're doing more than just "appending to the end of the log". If you're going to make an index of any kind, the index will likely be fastest with some sort of B-Tree.
They do? In my experience, lack of abstraction (often due to not analyzing the issue at hand thoroughly) results in non-abstract, verbose, hard to understand and refactor code. It's the difference between, say, building an SQL query by appending strings to a buffer (move one line and everything blows up) and building a model of your query (projection, etc...). Sure, the abstraction means more code, but it's much more easier to manipulate and considerably less risk-prone. It won't be faster than doing it the other way, but it won't be necessarily measurably slower.
I think she meant that a lot of hemming and hawing in the conversation is really maddening to someone who can feel something negative is coming. The fact that it's said is the important part.
There's something to be said for read, fire, aim rather than ready, aim, fire. You can only aim if you have a good perspective on the issue, which you probably don't if you lack expertise.
That largest bacterium's size is incorrect. It shows a chain of them as 750um, but in reality just one can become that large. In the picture, they look as big as a human ovum at 120um, but obviously that's not accurate.
Yes, you can still learn when you're older. Especially if you have an inquisitive mind like most hackers. The brain doesn't "solidify" completely as you age, it just solidifies the knowledge you already have. People have learned languages past 30, just by immersion, which is a very complex task.
That drawing is realistic yet creepy. I like it. The shading is perfect, yet incomplete. Sort of an uncanny valley type thing, gives you a sense of unease.
That's probably because at that time (more than 30 years ago) I was trying for photorealism, and I perhaps shouldn't have been -- I didn't have the skill. As a result, my drawings from that time all have that somewhat spooky aura.
Maybe you don't have a learning disability, but you definitely seem like you have some sort of mental block that is preventing you from being able to learn certain things. Maybe things you consider boring, and you can't focus enough on them to get past them?