Dr Dobbs was pretty good until almost the end, no? If memory serves me well, I recall the magazine got thinner and more sparse towards the end, but still high signal-to-noise ratio. Quite the opposite of Ars T.
Huge debt of gratitude to DDJ. I remember taking the bus to the capital every month just to buy the magazine on the newsstand.
I would go to the library on my bicycle to scour for a new copy of DDJ as a 10 year old.
I had dreams of someday meeting “Dr.
Dobbs.” Of course, that was back in the day when Microsoft mailed me a free Windows SDK with printed manuals when I sent them a letter asking them how to write Windows programs, complete with a note from somebody important (maybe Ballmer) wishing me luck programming for Windows. Wish I’d kept it.
“Eternal September or the September that never ended was a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. Before this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time, in sync with the academic calendar.”
I’ve probably watched Hackers over a hundred times. My all time favourite movie. My first crush as a young teenager was Burn. It led to a career in software. So many kindred spirits on this thread - makes me smile.
And after 30+ years of watching Hackers, it only occurred to me recently that the biggest noob in the movie Joey beat the Gibson, twice. Sure he had assistance the second time, but still poetic imho.
Hackers inspired me to start digging around on my FreeBSD laptop and learn how to setup a bitmap image as boot splash, just like the kids in the movie all had their own custom boot image.
Just a few years later I dropped out of school and started my career, haven't looked back since.
My first boss who gave me my first chance, and my 2nd job through referral, he dropped out of 7th grade to start his own business. He was once interrogated by police, and they had brought in some experts from a big ISP, and these "experts" had no idea what he was talking about. :D
I was a young adult back then, but the sense of adventure in the movie brought my memories of BBSs and creative misuse of telephone lines, X.400 networks, and dial-out modems. Fun times.
I had just started getting an interest in computers and went to the cinema with my boyfriend at the time who was (and remains) a classic computer programmer. I remember sitting in the cinema with him, both of us laughing hysterically at the ridiculousness of it all. I felt like I was in the in-crowd to understand the film was all artefact and fashion, but for all that it captured something accurate about the community's need for belonging, in spite of the anarchic messaging. I feel that hasn't changed much and maybe it's why we still love this movie, along with Sneakers, Silicon Valley, Office Space and War Games. Maybe it's also why coder movies like The Social Network and Ex Machina don't resonate as community favourites because they don't bring an inclusive experience.
The ad campaign was super campy, there were print ads in comic books, I remember making fun of it before the movie came out - this can’t be any good, they are going to misrepresent computer geeks, it’s going to be stupid. Of course as a teen I didn’t think it was authentic enough but over time I look at it with more respect. I showed it to my 10 year old not too long ago (forgot that there was a little nudity, oh well) and I was proud of claiming the culture it represented. The thirst for knowledge, the irreverence for authority, all of the different kinds of people making a community based on shared interest and respect, all night hackathons, the adults who just don’t get it - and yeah, the music and the fashion. That’s the stuff that matters, not a hacker using a Mac or goofy technical gibberish, and that’s the stuff they got right. It was a special moment in time, and I’m glad the movie is around to encapsulate it.
I've seen the movie countless times. It was only last year that I learned it was "butter zone" and not "border zone". And I never understood why Nikon called it "border zone" as it made no sense in context. But I also had never heard the term "butter zone". So there you go.
The use of the soda can pull tab to ground the receiver to get a dial tone was my moment as I was a noob phreaker well before being a hacker. How many kids watching that movie would even know what was happening today? Would they even know what he picks up off the ground let alone the actual phreaking
Yeah, me too.
And I gobbled up the Phreak culture from my danish small town life, dreaming of late eighties AT&T escapades with my crew of cool street kids… RISC is good.
Man, I didn't see hackers for the first time until probably 5 years after I wrote my first line of code. I still watch it to this day but I got started when I saw "wavy colored text" in an AOL chat room. Yup, colored sup and sub text. Fascinated me as an 11/12 year old and I picked up Visual Basic 5. Good times
I only became aware of the use of a different term than "floppy" for the hard 3.5" disks when I opened this thread- you'd have to ask the person I was replying to where they're from.
I was under the impression that a floppy disk is referring to the substrate that holds the data, not the cartridge that contains it. So a 3.5" floppy disk would be "floppy" in contrast to a 3.5" hard disk drive that has rigid metal or glass platters.
This nomenclature could be a regional thing though (I'm from the US).
Italian here, and I never heard of the term either.
Everybody always used the term floppy also for the 3.5 disks
I guess that since it was a foreign word the physical connotation of the term was simply lost, and "a floppy" was just the disk that your computer used.
Perhaps you can start with comparing 1,000 individual INSERTs (each with its own COMMIT) vs. 1,000 INSERTs wrapped in a single BEGIN/COMMIT block. This test is particularly interesting for comparing different RDBMS because it reveals how each engine balances data durability (ACID) against performance. You will likely find that some DB have a much higher tax on commits than others, which is a key factor in choosing a DB for a specific use case.
Since you are in C, please make sure to use prepared statements. If you send raw SQL strings, you are partially benchmarking the string parser of the DB rather than the actual data manipulation. Also, remember to "warm up" the DB with a few hundred runs before you start the timer, otherwise, the results will be skewed by the initial disk-to-memory cache loading.
Imagine the year is 2035.
Crash & Burn had a kid, and that kid is now a young adult.
An agentic ClosedAI has granted itself chmod 666 on the interwebs, and is wreaking havoc on a global scale.
Hackers of the world must unite once again to overcome evil.
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