Posts by Sam Shore

Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake

Re: Double-Dutch police screwup?

"Do they have a remote shredder? :)"

You say that in jest, but back in 2014 UK spooks forced the guardian to shred hard disks as evidence of destroying material they should not have had access to. The Guardian did point out that as the data was files on a disk, they could have been duplicated anywhere, but GCHQ was content with seeing hard disks destroyed, and brushed any suggestions from journalists that "they could have copied it a million times by now to any media in the world" comments.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq

ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you

Re: Memory

The comments section is full of people on the spectrum, who confuse should-not, with cannot.

Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue

Re: BS

"I always wondered if it would work from an AC supply but my parents were adverse to letting me connect to standard UK 240V mains!"

Ahem, I found not asking always worked. The motor burst into a shower of sparks and flew across the room after the power wires melted. I think I was 12 at the time. It didn't trip the fuses and the parents remain completely unaware of it to this day.

UNIX V4 tape successfully recovered: First ever version of UNIX written in C is running again

So is it the source code, or the binaries, or both?

New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good

we one wrapped a guy up with an entire roll of stretch wrap and left him up in the air on a forklift while we went out to lunch.

Typical pranks we got up to in the 90s, but looking back now, totally unsafe and potentially deadly :p

EU metes out first-ever Digital Services Act fine, dings X for blue check deception

Re: silly statement old chap

"If american businesses operate in Europe then they are obliged to abide by European law. It's so simple to understand."

It's not so simple. If an American business has local representation in the EU, i.e. it has an office and staff there, then that representation has to abide by EU law. If it doesn't then good luck to the EU trying to enforce any penalties they try to send to that PO box in the US.

Hegseth needs to go to secure messaging school, report says

In other news, the DOD Inspector General was seen leaving the pentagon today holding a cardboard box, and some highschool sports trophies.

Re: When this administration fails

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump pardons everyone everywhere for all federal crimes as he leaves office with one sweep of his pen, like he did the 1500 insurrectionists on his way into office. And then there's always the possibility that with his own pet SCOTUS, he may not leave office.

Seven years later, Airbus is still trying to kick its Microsoft habit

Re: MS to Google

Of course it’s backed up. It’s in Googles Cloud!!!

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: Want

There is a concerted effort going on, within the SCUG community to get a bunch of arcade port/clones done, all of which are in various stages of completion. They are on the lookout for Z80 programmers to help get them complete.

Re: Want

You have Sim Coupe for starters which is the PC based emulator, and you'll have the Next 3 arriving in a few weeks, which will have the Sam Coupe core, with SD card reading ability. Machines like the Manuferhi N-Go , the Xberry and Active Next will have the core made available to them, if you want a nice desktop machine.

Re: Humbug

* Oi, I resemble that remark!!

Re: Humbug

So I should get the funk out?

Re: Want

You should join the Sam Usergroup linked above. They have a bunch of ongoing projects that require scrolling. It's a common topic of conversation there. They have a pair of friendly dedicated Sam artists who generate sprites etc for projects. It's a nice place.

Re: Want

Interesting, have you got a video of this working scrolling we can see.

Re: Humbug

And I suppose that if I cannot pull a guitar out, and play Nuno Bettencourts Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee despite being a proficient piano player, that I have no rights listening to the music of Extreme?

A credit check shows they have about £1.7 million in assets, and £150K in liabilities, so they look financially sound.

That and they have form, they sold over 40000 TheSpectrum units recently, and has been pointed out before, they have released many different retro boxes over the years, to the tune of tens of thousands each run.

Get a muffler for those bells!

Re: Want

2 sold individually in average condition sold recently for around £500 each.

After being picked up on eBay they usually end up being tarted up and displayed on the Sam Coupe User Group

Re: Humbug

Most people, i.e. not Reg readers, do not have the technical skills to put the effort in to get an emulator up and running, and just want to buy something they can plug in, and go. This fills that niche nicely.

Microsoft teases agents that become ‘independent users within the workforce’

Re: Oh Jaysus

I had to talk to an AI bot from Lloyds bank the other day, because I could not access my online banking.

The very first statement it made was that I should hand over no personal details such as my name or account number.

The second statement was a request for my account number.

The third statement it made was that it could not assist me with my problem, and that I had to raise it using the online banking platform.

.......@...........

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Damn AI!!!

There's a french company I do business with that uses the characters 0Oo1IiLlFf in their stock codes, case sensitive!. Changing the font can result in a completely different product being ordered.

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

Re: "eventually reaching the surface and exploding as expected"

/me grabs the popcorn and waits for the comments from the antivaxxers, flat earthers Musk haters! They must be frothing at the mouth with this. Expect an incoming barrage of denial coming this way.

UK Post Office names public inquiry as risk to £410 million Horizon replacement project

Re: Off the shelf

The UK post office isn't just a sales counter for postage, it's also a bank, insurer and also an outlet for official government documentation and services with a single terminal for all it's functions.

Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum

Re: Z80 thinking “Still wins in 2025”

I spotted this a couple of months ago. An 8 bit computer (think spectrum era technology) for learning 80s style computing.... but it has dual CPUs. A Z80 and a 6502.

https://www.thebyteattic.com/p/cerberus-2100.html

Interesting piece of retro kit.

Apple tries get €500M EU fine tossed

It takes more balls to stay the 20 year course to get the outcome you want, than to throw your hands up in the air, throw Apple out of the EU and walk away muttering and shaking your head.

AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

“The next best thing is something like TheA500 mini from Retro Games Ltd. “

Retro Games is planning to release a full size keyboarded A1200 this year, and it’s all legal.

Plans to release a full sized A500 were scupperred and bogged down by the legal issues surrounding it so they have side stepped it by going for the A1200.

Microsoft rolls out Windows 11 Start Menu updates

For me this only works 50% of the time. I.e. if I type:-

Calc

Half the time the windows calculator pops up, the other half is a Bing search result. Similar happens with running commands with switches. I either get the full command, or the command but minus the switches, or a Bing search for it.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

“mounting engines on the top of the aircraft rather than the bottom“

So time to pull Concorde out of mothballs, fill it up with passengers and fly it upside down then!

Elon Musk pukes over pork-filled budget bill with Tesla subsidies on the line

Re: In other news….

But it lands in many many pieces!

Re: Popcorn time

If the president does it, it isn’t illegal!

In other news….

Tariffs on Starship landings are increased by 500%!

Apple has only 30 days to comply with EU DMA rules

Re: So the EU is saying

Devs registering as an app developer to get access to the app store makes Apple $2.7bn per year. That's a far cry from providing all the infrastructure for free...

Not going well for Apple at the moment. Decades of illegal actions and legal disobedience all being dealt with at the same time in a crescendo of smack-downs across the world. Last week a US judge ordered Apple to name the executive responsible for it's ignoring of court orders, and suddenly Fortnite is allowed back on IOS, and all legal issues between Epic and Apple are settled.

Couldn't happen to a nicer company.

German court parks four Volkswagen execs in jail over Dieselgate scandal

"A rare case of execs actually being held to account"

And almost at the same time, a judge threatens an Apple exec, and Apple suddenly comes to a settlement with Epic after how many years and how many billions. Now Fortnite is back on IOS. It's almost as if holding execs to account makes companies act differently. How refreshing.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/19/judge-pressures-apple-to-approve-fortnite-or-return-to-court/

Courts tend to be very pragmatic. Cases that take years cost millions. No-one wants to have a 4 year multimillion $ court case stumble in the last week because the 78 year old defendant drops dead of old age.

Trump threatens to add formal Apple Tax on top of the 'Apple tax'

Re: Partners are leaving to start their own firm

The threat wasn't just against the law firms. The threat was against any firm that hired lawyers on Trumps boycott list. An example would be Microsoft. If Microsoft continued to be represented by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, then Microsoft would have been cut off from all federal contracts to supply MS products. The threat was that law firms would not be able to find work of any kind at any company performing work for the federal government. And that is a LOT of firms, from Coca Cola that supplies federal canteens, to BIC who supply pens. As it turns out, Microsoft were represented by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, right up until the law firm capitulated to Trump, then Microsoft terminated their deal with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and are now being represented by Jenner & Block, who were also on the boycott list, but are fighting back. It would seem the large firms have taken the view that a law firm that will not defend itself, cannot be relied upon to defend their client.

Whether Trumps government carries out it's threat to cancel any federal contract with anyone being represented by the firms on it's boycott list remains to be seen. The courts so far have found in favour of the law firms, but felon Trump is above the law, and has SCOTUS blessing his every whim, so even the wins gained so far, could tomorrow be thrown out.

Re: Is that even legal?

If you follow Legal Eagle, he posted a video with an addendum on the 23rd, stating that Scotus has overturned it's 1935 Humphrey's Executor decision, meaning Trump can fire anyone, even people protected by congress laws that don't work for him!

Even a humble keyboard is now political in Taiwan

Re: "a warehouse in California"

I supply goods to the US. You can’t evade tariffs, but they can be avoided. It’s a constant game of whack a mole finding and using the customs loopholes, before the US wisens up to it, and closes the loophole, and then you move onto the next.

Apple slams door on Fortnite's stateside iOS comeback

Re: Actions will have been ran by lawyers and approved

Who said anything about discovery. Anonymous whistleblowers and/or people who are willing to do a deal to avoid prosecution and/or being thrown under a bus or scapegoated by their employers are a thing.

"well 'this person once visited a gay bar so obviously."

Yes, because that kind of thing really does sway the courts I made reference to......

Ok let me spell it out for you. The closets I want exposing are the ones with skeletons in them, the smoking gun as it were. Apple have been found guilty of illegal conduct in multiple jurisdictions by multiple courts. Apple individuals have been named by the courts as lying in court and engaging in illegal conduct. Proof if this will exist somewhere. Named individuals will not have been acting alone, they will have got approval from seniors, the courts need to know who. Actions will have been ran by lawyers and approved. Proof of this will exist in the form of emails, MacWord documents, MacPowerPoint presentations, databases and meeting minutes. All this dirt needs to be unearthed so the courts can hold people accountable.

Apple are not being punished for being successful as you argue, they are being punished for illegal activity.....

Apple have already been ruled against by courts in multiple jurisdictions, so it's time for Epic to get personal and to start digging up dirt on individuals at Apple, that it can submit to the relevant courts worldwide, and get real physical people thrown in jail and/or fined into bankruptcy. The moment upper management start to see inside of cells or lose their homes, is the moment other management members turn and walk away, leaving Tim Cook on the hook for all the activities these courts are finding illegal. Even Bill Gates is on record as having said (and I paraphrase) "If there's one word of advice I can give to anyone, it's don't end up being sued by governments".

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

junk like the Celeron

As the former owner of both the Abit BP6 and VP6 with dual Celerons I can confirm the performance was anything but junk, tho at the price, you may have thought you were buying junk.

IIRC each chip was roughly half the price of the Pentium it was based upon, and benchmarked at 90% of the speed.

No windows software at the time supported dual processors, but, running 2 apps that could each max out a CPU was very doable.

Linux users were quite fond of it. I sold many systems to a software house that used them in a linux based compute farm they developed and sold time on.

Developer sues Apple to claw back commission payments

Re: outright lied under oath

The problem with referring it to the DOJ is that Trump could pardon him. Trump can’t pardon Civil Contempt tho.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

“insist on having your name and writing it on your cup regardless of your wishes seem to offer.…”

Thats where you have your memorised phrase ready “aaaah surname Hunt, first name Mike”

Come up with something like that and practice it so it’s second nature, and you’ll be surprised how easily many people fall into the trap.

Cook'd: Judge says Apple lied to court in Epic case, asks Feds to mull criminal charges

The threat of legal action is not extortion, when both parties are already in an extended and ongoing litigation.

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

Re: Data subject access request

That’s why you do it from the ICO website to the email address they have to list in their privacy policy. Make it a specific request only a person would have to respond to.

Add blizzard to the list too. IIRC if you had Bbattlenet installed, and the original 2002 Warcraft 3 installed. A good stand alone game, they amended it so you could only start it now if you have internet connectivity.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

"have they ever triggered apart form the static shocks?"

Not outside of testing no. We got close in the 4-6 weeks of summer, but that was taken care of when one of us had the idea of a process that polled the temperatures once a minute, and if the temperature started to creep up past 25 we'd slow down the processors to compensate. Without that the temperatures would skyrocket in summer. A heat feedback process was taking place, hot air coming out the back, would circulate round, go through the machine again and come out hotter. We had dual air-con systems, the idea being one was a backup for the other, but during summer, even having them both turned on we would still get the heat runaway, so for 4-6 weeks each year we just processed slower, and lived with it.

The funny thing is the thermometers were rated for -25 to 145 degrees, but they always reported 3000 with the electric shocks. Seemed a weirdly arbitrary value for it's dev to put a hard limit on. If it had been 32767 degrees etc I'd have accepted it with a smirk.