Posts by ZX8301

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

Re: Divers log

Ah, that’ll be why ten gallon hats overflow after just eight.;-)

UK bans game controller exports to Russia in bid to ground drone attacks

Re: PMSL

Kempston made interfaces in the UK, but their joysticks were imported. Konix did make controllers in Wales for a few years, though Winn Holloway deliberately chose a ‘Japanese sounding’ brand for them. And the ambitious Slipstream did for them, though it did eventually spawn Atari’s UK-designed and developed Jaguar console.

AmigaOS updated in 2025 for some reason

Re: Still runs well on 35 year old hardware

Indeed, there was no Motorola 68050 - I was a member of the 68060 alpha/beta test program and told the 050 people moved over to that without making anything. Of course numbers aren’t trademarks, Philips CDI used a ‘68070’ slower than a 68000 and though my Cyberstorm mark 1 and 2 are 68060-based and the makers went bust it’s quite possible that a ‘mark 3’ could have a misleadingly-numbered non-Motorola clone or more likely FPGA inside. Or it could be a typo. ;-)

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Re: Nothing to beat it on $/Gb basis.

The extraterritorial COCOM regulations prohibited export of microdrives to perceived enemies of USA because the bit density (achieved with a stereo cassette tape head) exceeded the limit the spooks had set for open-reel datatapes a decade earlier.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

Re: Security & updates

YMWV. There’s no requirement to have automatic updates selected in order to use Revolut or Apple Pay on my iPhone 7s, up to date with iOS 15.8.3

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Atari BASIC

ATARI bought that BASIC in, they didn’t write it. With long variable names (tokenised for constant speed) and long strings it was substantially more readable and capable than MBASIC, and closer to the Dartmouth standard rather than the DEC BASIC+ fork (also bought in, BTW, and the model for Gates and Allen’s subset copy).

ATARI BASIC arithmetic was slow because it used BCD rather than binary floating-point. Microsoft copied that for Z80 MSX BASIC, perhaps to make their machine-translated 8088 BASIC look less embarrassingly slow in comparison.

Re: First BASIC I used

Weiland was the 6502 programmer. Gates wouldn’t touch the ‘brain damaged’ CPU (preferring the 8080, and thus showing little respect for addressing modes) but had a point about the 8-bit stack pointer. Hence Weiland’s 6502 ports were almost given away by Microsoft, who copied their BASIC from the one DEC bought in, right down to quirks like byte-length limited strings, the ambiguous RIGHT$ and the Cobolesque FIELD. Atari, Sinclair and ANSI stuck with the more general slicing of Dartmouth BASIC and string length limited only by RAM. C victims could learn useful lessons from BASIC’s string-handling.

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

Acorn put *transistors* in backwards

Acorn interchanged NPN and PNP transistors in the video output of their Atom computers, making it a small miracle that anyone got a TV picture. Transistor notwithstanding the botched mono output was at US 60 Hertz (for UK TVs expecting 50) and glitched white spots whenever the 6K ‘hires’ display RAM was accessed by the CPU during pixel output. Space invaders looked like a snowstorm even after you adjusted the vertical hold and assuming a signal leaked through the reversed transistor. Still, the BBC adored them ;-(

Europe's largest local authority slammed for 'poorest' ERP rollout ever

Local authorities are very different from businesses - consider the legal requirement for each item of expenditure to be traceable directly to a council vote, the hundreds of statutory obligations, and contrast those with ‘maximise shareholder benefit’ - a system designed for global commerce is a rotten fit and Oracle has clearly been mis-sold or purchased regardless of its inappropriateness.

As to why local councils don’t club together to invest in shared tech, or hire more and smarter people, consider the burgeoning of social costs dumped upon them by Westminster, the evisceration of their funding over the last 15 years, the forced sale of council assets (worth billions just in the Birmingham context) at distress prices, accompanied by legal prohibitions on reinvestment (and the ruinous requirement to store proceeds at top (bogus) rates, it turned out with criminal bankers in Iceland) and theft through privatisation in the specific case of the locally-funded water and sewerage systems. The second city is being crushed by the first and this fracas is symptomatic.

If your AI does the crime, you'll do the time, warns DoJ

Re: Just remember. . .

Gaol

Europe's largest city council: Oracle ERP allocated £2B in transactions to wrong year

Re: Why do people still buy this junk?

There’s a reciprocal agreement in the Midlands, Krakead, which means hire cars registered in Wolverhampton can operate in counties that make registration more difficult and expensive. Hence here in Warwickshire almost all the Ubers appear to have come from the other side of the West Midlands. They haven’t really.

Re: plus the 1600 activities local authorities are responsible for

Impressive list and makes the point but seems shaky on detail - “Midwifery and maternity services” were indeed a local authority responsibility last century but were subsumed by the NHS long ago, according to the midwife I’m sitting next to. ‘Short breaks’ and ‘Armed forces recruitment’ are hardly direct responsibilities, and National Identity Cards still aren’t a local UK thing, are they?

IBM scores $45M zinger from Zynga in patent wringer

But it cuts both ways - if IBM hadn’t paid patent royalties on the Williams tube the National Research Development Corporation would’ve been still-born and we’d have missed out on Hovercraft, Pegasus computers, Ambisonics and erm, Sinclair ‘pocket’ televisions.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

My last encounter with the Green Hills compiler was when porting Codemasters’ Neon Engine to the Nintendo Wii-U, my first decades earlier as chunks of the Amiga Kickstart ROM depended upon it. Solid, indeed. Wonder what’s still using it but not secret?

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Re: NT on Power PC

More than 300 million powerPC-based game consoles have shipped. The PPC-602 set the ball rolling when it was designed for the 3D0 M2, though that only shipped as a Devkit.

Microsoft’s original Xbox 360 devkits were actually Apple dual-processor G5 towers, with a software downgrade, of course. The 134 million-odd Nintendos ran nicely on derivatives of the much-simpler Mac G3 CPU.

Here are the total PPC console sales, in millions.

PS3 87

Xbox 360 86

GameCube 22

Wii 102

Wii-U 14

TOTAL 311

After that Microsoft switched to AMD, got trounced by Sony, and no longer release Xbox sales figures.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

SAM BASIC source

Liam is wrong about Andy Wright and the SAM BASIC source. It was freely released on disc by the author and (mislabelled as an anotated disassembly) is available in PDF format at http://sam.speccy.cz/rom/sam_rom_v3-0_disasm_annotated.pdf . That shows how very much better use could have been made of 32K ROM than the Sinclair/Investronica lash-up, given sufficient time and talent.

For almost no functional benefit (a sluggish editor with no key roll-over, prone to losing characters or whole lines, buggy RAM disc and a pointless hardware music player copied from Microsoft, ignorant of bars and blocking anything else from running as it bleeped) the Spectrum 128 ROM adds more than twice as many bugs as the original 16K ROM had (released without the knowledge of the developers at Nine Tiles, who hadn't finished it) and it fixed none of the earlier errors well-documented in the Logan book Goodwins understandably cribbed from.

Former IBM Canada worker wins six-figure payout for wrongful dismissal

IBM UK boss Sir Edwin Nixon was granted an honorary degree at my graduation in 1985, pontificating about ‘the growth of the spatial marketplace’. I happened to be sitting next to a new grad with a first in Comp Sci, who’d just applied for a job at IBM and been turned down, saying “they said they’re not hiring anyone from here because they took too many last year.” Go figure.