Posts by Simon Harris

How CP/M-86's delay handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom

"There are definitely alternate universe 'What If's to be had, not only what if IBM had gone ... with a 68000 processor..."

There was the short lived IBM System 9000.

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

"just didn't have the elegance of the 6502, 6809 and 68000 processors"

and then there's the craziness of the 65C816.

Re: CP/M·86

I remember the Victor 9000/Sirius 1 used to run CPM-86 in addition to MS-DOS.

As an early contemporary of the IBM PC, it was actually pretty well specced, but not very compatible.

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

One of the sources of annoyance with the way segment registers worked is that when you were compiling software you had to select the memory model you wanted - if I remember correctly you had a choice of 5:

everything (code, data) shared the same 64K segment.

code and data could each be up to 64K, but in different segments.

code was up to 64K, but data could be larger.

code was as large as you wanted, but data was up to 64K

code and data could each be larger than 64K.

The problem that resulted was that let's say you opted for one of the smaller memory models in version 1 of your software, and then your program or data requirements grew and you wanted to create a more capable version 2 - it could suddenly mean that either or both of your 16-bit data or function pointers could suddenly change to 32-bits, which had the capability of royally screwing things up, particularly if they were parts of data structures, and meant the sizes of those structures changed. If serialising data to save it consisted of just dumping a block of memory to disc (and remember storage was limited and speeds weren't that great so it was common to copy it out the fastest way possible), you could easily create incompatibilities between data from old and new versions.

Incidentally, long pointers were often stored as Segment:offset. Since the segment register was 16 bits, you have the added inefficiency of needing 32 bits to represent a 20 bit physical address, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, that meant a whole load of different segment:offset combinations representing the same physical address making long pointer comparisons a pain.

Boffins probe commercial AI models, find an entire Harry Potter book

Too much Harry Potter.

I realised that AI had been reading too much Harry Potter when I asked it to give me a sorting algorithm.

It could have given me a quick sort, merge sort, even a bubble sort. Instead it gave me a hat sort.

Re: I can believe it

"speaking the lines of M.A.S.H. about 15·20 seconds before the actors."

My ex would do that with Shakespeare. Bit annoying when you're actually trying to watch the play!

Could he recite, verbatim, the dialogue from Fahrenheit 451?

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

"When I eventually read the text I was struck how derivative the material was"

When I first came across Harry Potter, another novel, written some 29 years previously, immediately came to mind. This is Wikipedia's introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

"It is regarded as a classic of children's literature and of fantasy, within which it is widely influential. The story is set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont. He displays great power while still a boy and joins a school of wizardry, where his prickly nature drives him into conflict with a fellow student. During a magical duel, Ged's spell goes awry and releases a shadow creature that attacks him. The novel follows Ged's journey as he seeks to be free of the creature."

Incidentally, the Earthsea books are well worth reading.

Baby's got clack: HP pushes PC-in-a-keyboard for businesses with hot desks

Although not much use without the cassette recorder sitting by its side.

Actually it's quite common on 12" rulers to have half the inches scale marked in 16ths, and half marked in 10ths.

The Y2K bug delayed my honeymoon … by 17 years!

Remind me how that Who song goes

“Meet the new boss, same as…”

Parachutists told to check software after jumper dangled from a plane

Not the usual jumper configuration story I was expecting to see on a technology page.

As humanoid robots enter the mainstream, security pros flag the risk of botnets on legs

Re: Bladerunner Inc.

You can identify the bad ones by their red glowing eyes...

It always happens when robots go rouge.

Mine's the one with the Doctor Who Robots of Death VHS in the pocket --------------->

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing (Sorry, Linus)

True, the schematics created by LLMs are pretty way off for many things.

However, even without asking for the schematics, and just asking it to say in text form what should be connected to what, it still manages to mess things up. The trouble is, it's partially correct so the wiring diagram of a 555 must be in its network somewhere, but I'm guessing it's polluted with wiring diagrams from other stuff, or alternate 555 configurations, so it gets to a certain point and then the probabilities of the pollutants take over. Even though it gives a confident step-by-step guide for wiring things up, you get half way through and think 'hey, that pin shouldn't go to that one', and notice that other things don't make sense either.

It also seems to be the case that when asking for the circuit, it can reproduce the standard databook formulae for the frequency and mark:space ratio from the passive components, but then fails to use that correctly to compute suitable values - again I'm guessing that because the timing characteristics involve multiplying resistor and capacitor values together, there are multiple ways of getting to the frequency you want (e.g. scale up the resistor values by the same amount you scale down the capacitor value), there are multiple versions of the circuit that it's been trained on, but even for the same frequency, the original authors have chosen different values, and for a system that works on probability those different values may all be similarly probabilistic pathways and it ends up with a mish-mash of components that don't work together.

Not surprised it fails at that.

It hasn’t yet managed to produce a correct wiring diagram and appropriate passive component values for a 555 astable circuit whenever I’ve asked, and that’s probably one of the most duplicated schematics online.

"doing it away from other people."

I do a lot of coding when it's quiet (mostly because when other people are around they want me to do other things!), but I do rely on other real people on Stack Overflow and other platform specific forums for help when I hit an intractable problem.

Re: You weren't there, man

"you would continue to think about efficiency and better coding practices throughout life."

I used to be in the situation where I had to think about efficiency. My first computer had 5K of program space, and I've programmed EPROMs and PICs down to the last byte.

Efficiency doesn't always yield better coding practices - when you've got a hard limit of the end of your ROM space sometimes you have to take short cuts to make things fit, and from a coding practice perspective they didn't always look nice!

To cover a wide variety of coding problems you need a lot of sample code to build your patterns from.

You could cover at least some of the 'power of 10' rules by filtering the learning examples to be just those that follow the rules (e.g. ensuring no training data includes gotos, no compiler directives other than #include, #define, very restricted use of pointers, etc.) so it doesn't 'know' code outside of the power of 10 coding subset. However, I doubt there is enough power of 10 code in the wild to cover the spectrum of questions likely to be asked of it.

This would require a lot of manual work to 1. curate any 'power of 10' code that does exist, and 2. rewrite and validate a significant amount of non-compliant examples that do exist to provide a wide enough training base of code.

While that might go some way to getting it to produce power of 10 compliant code, by virtue of it not having patterns for certain non-compliant coding structures, I doubt it would be enough to ensure an LLM produced code that completely followed the rules, and it would be a mammoth human undertaking to create the training data, rather than lifting non-compliant code from the many sources where that already exists.

"I know hardly anything about Python, and don't really have the desire to learn." ... "Looking at the code, it seems quite good."

Personally I wouldn't profess to be able to judge the quality of the code if I knew hardly anything about the language, but that's just me.

Microsoft wedges tables into Notepad for some reason

Re: They broke it.

"The only useful additions to Notepad was the whole CR/CRLF thing and maybe UTF."

And putting in a proper Undo/Redo history.

Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant

IoF

Internet of Fing(er)s

AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory

Re: Grok effort

I couldn't do a country style tune to it in my head, but I can imagine the rhythm working as rap.

Re: Stock, Aitkin and Waterman

If you didn't know who they were, you might be forgiven for thinking they were a firm of accountants...

... If you did know who they were, you might be forgiven for thinking they were a firm of accountants.

Why Elon Musk won't ever realize the shareholder-approved Tesla payout

Re: What's next?

Considering the two words as ASCII strings, there are only two bits that are different in the two. If we assume 8-bit characters, that puts them at 93.75% identical. About 92.86% if we consider 7-bit ASCII.

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

Re: UNIX v4, saved by Rust!

For early 1970s, my money would be on iron-oxide.

Chrome was just beginning to make an appearance in audio and had different bias and equalisation requirements from iron oxide, and as I understand it, didn't appear in data tapes until later.

Re: Damn AI!!!

At least if there's a check character, it's unlikely that a number/letter substitution would result in a valid product code. You'd just have a fun time trying all the variations until you hit the correct one!

25 years of meatbags permanently in space on the ISS

Re: Packing for Mars

"Astronauts come to realize they've been looking right at the object they're searching for, for hours, and not recognized it."

To be fair, that's me and the tools on my workbench.

If astronauts have trouble finding the tools infront of them, I suggest they take their wives.

Hacking LED Halloween masks is frighteningly easy

Re: Does it also work on Vapes ?

From these very pages from a few years ago…

https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/02/adult_fun_toy_security_fail/

How do you solve a problem like Discovery?

This really should have been a Special Project for the much missed Lester Haines.

AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better, researchers discover

Re: Chatgpt was useful to me

Actually DATE YOUR WORK UNAMBIGUOUSLY.

Don’t expect an AI summariser, or even a human reader, to guess correctly which country’s style of dating you’re using.

Re: AI == Divination?

Surely Jon Pertwee was the third Doctor, with Tom Baker being the fourth.

I suspect that AI summarisers have a problem with subtleties of negation as they quite often seem to say the exact opposite of the page they've pulled the information from.

"Classic Example: How to make a cup of tea.

And then think about instant coffee"

Both examples that can't even rely on common knowledge but also have to be cross-referenced to the individual drinker's personal preferences and the environment.

Nowhere in the common knowledge of tea or coffee making does it say that one of my colleagues is lactose intolerant, so I have to use pea milk in that tea instead of cow milk, or my wife only ever wants her coffee cup half filled, and kills it with too many sweeteners, or that I might only have decaf in the evening if I hope to sleep, and that while I have milk in a lot of tea, I prefer Earl Grey with lemon.

And am I at work throwing a tea-bag in a mug, or going all posh and using tea leaves in a pot, or having chimarrão with my wife, who is Brazilian, which is a whole different way of making and drinking tea.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

"enhance security and user experience of Windows 11."

Why does everything have to have an enhanced user experience these days?

Tomorrow I have a trip to the dentist. I expect they'll email me a survey afterwards asking about my user experience.

Pentagon decrees warfighters don't need 'frequent' cybersecurity training

Re: Very strange

"Have we gone so long without a real war threat for people to forget war is about killing people?"

Since the other side have the same aim, surely war is also about trying not being killed yourself, or getting your unit killed. It therefore makes sense to ensure your side are well trained in not providing your enemy with a digital signature to target you.

Remember that war is also about propaganda, and an enemy may well intercept and broadcast unguarded communications to bolster their own propaganda, particularly if you're whinging about stuff, which needs training out of professional fighting forces.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the department's chief information officer to "relax the mandatory frequency for cybersecurity training,"

Is this the same Pete Hegseth who thought it would be a good idea to post details of airstrikes in Yemen on a Signal group that included a journalist?

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

If it's too big to move...

... can't they just send them an X-37 and a magnifying glass?

Explain digital ID or watch it fizzle out, UK PM Starmer told

Well, if it's vibe coded it will probably be full of obvious errors, and the photograph will probably bear as much resemblance to the holder as the Spanish church Ecce Homo 'restoration'.

The bit about patients accessing the best healthcare sounds like he's gone off at a tangent and is talking about the NHS website/app as a separate 'isn't IT good for us' thought, rather than specifically integrating it into the digital ID system.

Microsoft moves to the uncanny valley with creepy Copilot avatars that stare at you and say your name

"Microsoft is testing talking avatars"

... and that's why I always keep the sound off on my work computer.

Re: Better options...

Would that be the Norman Lovett Holly or the Hattie Hayridge Holly?

Blood-red bot stalks the burbs armed with . . . groceries

Henry.

Did they just look at a Henry Hoover, and say 'we want something a bit like this'?

Re: Won't work in the UK either.

"Wheelie-bins blocking them - put them in the front garden!"

Our bin-men don't collect them unless we move them from the inside of our garden wall to the outside onto the pavement. Since they arrive at some random time between 5am and 10am, that means putting them out the night before and often bringing them back in after work the next day.

Brit scientists over the Moon after growing tea in lunar soil

Unfortunately, the Martian tea failed to grow at all.

Maybe they didn't use enough astronaut poo to fertilise it.

Curious connections: Voyager probes and Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Re: A 280 processor?

"The Z280 had many advanced features for its time, most of them never seen again on a Zilog processor"

So not an overwhelming success then!

The longest wait was the five minutes it took to blow a new 32k UVEPROM.

Of course if you were strapped for cash, and didn't have many to spare, the longest wait was the 1/2 hour or so in the UV eraser to wipe the previous version of the software from the EPROM first.

Terminators: AI-driven robot war machines on the march

I'm not so worried about AI controlled weapons directly killing us...

I'm more worried that AI generated extremist claptrap and the algorithms that target this stuff will polarise society to the extent we'll do it ourselves.

Re: Maverick won't be able to beat VENOM AI-equipped F16s fighter planes

When I was checking the above quote from that movie (Stealth, that is), I came across this one

"Once you design something to learn, you can't put stipulations on *what* it learns! Learn this, but don't learn that? He could learn from Adolf Hitler, he could learn from Captain Kangaroo! It's all the same to him!"

which, for an otherwise ridiculous movie, seemed like quite a good description of ChatGPT, Grok, etc.

Re: Hold on a moment

"It's amazing how much "AI research" is slapping a prompt into a chatbot"

Indeed. It's like since phones started having cameras built in, everyone thinks they're a photographer.

Now you can get ChatGPT or Copilot as a button on your browser, everyone suddenly thinks they're an AI expert.

Maverick won't be able to beat VENOM AI-equipped F16s fighter planes

But only after they've downloaded all the songs from the web.