Lion ponderings

It was while making the simplest model in Blender that the lion kingdom remembered how a 160x200 wireframe of the same thing was about the most complicated 3D graphics a Commodore 64 could draw in a reasonable amount of time. With much experience, it's now obvious how dedicating memory to lookup tables & using fixed point math could have greatly accelerated it. Could there be any point in writing optimized 3D drawing routines for a Commodore 64 now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-0DdRHA-ZQ The cybertruck looks like it does because it's an exoskeleton. The exoskeleton dictates a truss structure, so we have compressive loads on the top pillars & expansive loads on the side pillars supporting all the weight that previously was supported by 2 I beams. It's the shape of trucks in sci-fi movies for the last 40 years. The price is relative to 2 years from now, when the competition's prices will be much higher. If anyone really thought truck prices weren't rising dramatically, they wouldn't own houses. The stainless steel finish is the look of the original Delorean everyone has wanted since 1985. Everything looks like a Model S nowadays, so everything will look like a cybertruck.

Remember when audio was a physical ribbon you could feel in your paw, but start handling tapes again, feel the jiggling pulleys & hubs, & the bad memories come back. It really sucked & lions don't miss it.  The internet never told the true story because no-one online today lived with tape. The mane problems were how the pinch roller collected magnetic particles that would print noise on the tape, every time you played it.  It didn't matter how often you cleaned the pinch roller.  The number of plays was limited by the gradual printing of additional noise. Did we adjust head azimuth with reference tapes & oscilloscopes?  FUGGEDABOUT IT.  It was always done by ear because every tape was recorded with slightly different alignment & none were perfect.  Commercial tapes too had bad alignment. Every tape had a slight imbalance between the 2 channels.  The tape relied on a foam pad to press it against the head, that couldn't be tensioned enough to

For 6 years, Lions have taken for granted that Macbooks run the same software as PC's, merely by running a virtual machine. They can run the same development environment for any day job as a PC. Easy to forget most of history wasn't like that. Macs weren't based on Intel CPU's but the PowerPC or even worse, the 68000. For 20 years, they existed in their own world, running completely scratch compiled software for big endian CPUs. Every PC since 1986 has been manely compati ble because they've all been based on the original 386, but Macs ditched 2 different instruction sets before finally switching to Intel. Running Linux on a Mac was a herculean task, requiring a separate version compiled for the PowerPC. It was terribly unreliable. The lion kingdom's mane concern is if it could happen again, with Macs once again switching to a different CPU than the rest of the world & all your development tools once again having to run on a PC

Fed the mane a final can of the original Hunts sauce. The $1 32oz can was the 1st spaghetti sauce lions cooked with & persisted for around 15 years. They're now almost gone from stores, relegated to just 1 flavor. The cans got smaller & the price increased, while the more expensive sauces got cheaper. The opportunity cost of a more expensive sauce is a lot smaller when paying $4000 rent than it was when rent was $400. They're still useful if you're providing your own solid ingredients & just need a tomato base. They still have a spicy edge the more expensive sauces don't have, but are a lot more watered down than they used to be.

The antireflective coating is finally, manely gone. Experience has shown it's not critical for indoor usage. The mane problem is the partially intact coating is obtrusive & most of the LCD's in the 40 year history of LCD's don't have this problem. A lot of people strip the antireflective coating from monitors of other brands to improve the contrast. Eucalyptol in common mouthwash completely removes the antireflective coating.

Ever since lions 1st floated the idea of using these as a pre race meal, they've taken off in popularity. They're a lot more expensive than they were, thanks to quantitative easing, so lions will stick with Walmart. Can't imagine how much it costs to manetain a stockpile of MREs with constant expiration dates. The consumer ones are not the same as the military ones, but probably have shorter expiration dates in favor of better flavor. When they 1st hit the news 40 years ago, the entire package was a heated meal. Today, the much hyped heated entrees are tiny packets in a sea of cold packets. They might as well leave out the heating element & make it a lot lighter. Most of the packets are crackers, cheese packets, instant coffee, bread, tortillas. There's no fresh fruit & vegetable. The only reason a lion could ever justify those is having a conveniently packaged meal in a remote location or curiosity.

The shift in daylight savings time enacted by Dubya was not as dramatic as the lion kingdom remembered. It was lengthened by 2 weeks in March & 1 week in October. The media complained endlessly about it. Dubya promoted it as his magic cure for energy consumption. It was just 3 weeks. Those of us alive before 2008 spend roughly as much of our waking hours in darkness as we did 30 years ago.