Posts by mikejames

US Army doubles down on laser tag with $95M for prototyping

But is it small enough to strap on to a sharks head...

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: newer != better

Simple. It takes a Polaroid snap and the customer posts it to the Utilities provider...

Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway

Re: The first one is free

Insert old joke about starting out knowing nothing about anything and ending up know everything about nothing...

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

This a critique of the original Pascal. Once Borland had transformed it into a 'proper' language a lot of the arguements were spent...

Dump C++ and in Rust you should trust, Five Eyes agencies urge

Check out

https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/

The ZX81 finally gets the keyboard it deserves

Re: Well...

And the ZX80 was a vast improvement over the thumb-busting keyboard on the Science of Cambridge Mk14... :-)

Re: How times have changed..

Only if you bought the Sinclair memory pack and ran out of bluetack. I had a 16k Memotech memory pack - it came with cutting-edge velcro...

Raspberry Pi production rate rising to a million a month

Re: A Bit Late Now

RPi's are OK but my goto SBC is a Beaglebone Black - more GPIO and PRUs for hard real-time control and comms.

NASA names astronauts picked for next Artemis Moon test flight

Re: What are the criteria for inclusion as crew?

Gil Scott-Heron`s gonna have to change his song...

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

Borland license

I wonder if any company has the balls to bring back the Borland No Nonsense license agreement.

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

File this please...

Years ago in a previous job a PA was asked to file our new shiny Z80 assembler, supplied on a 5 1/4" floppy, in the project file. So she promptly put the disk into a binder hole punch and, after putting 2 holes in it, clipped it into a folder...

Luckily missing the edge of the rust.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

Re: Good.

In Manchester, on the metrolink, the tram system is known as the Tram Operating System - the drivers say they are logging in to the TOSbox...

IT manager's 'think outside the box' edict was, for once, not (only) a revolting cliché

Sorted...

Years ago at another company we hade a large collection of CMOS and TTL ICs that needed sorting and labelling. We got some shiny new racks of drawers and conductive foam and an engineer from the shop floor to undertake the task. He duly got to work and after a couple of days he'd completed his task. I went to have a look at one of the labels on a drawer... What's a 2285? It turned out that he had sorted all the ICs by date of manufacture...