Posts by Blue Pumpkin 90 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007
Ha ! I remember those - I was an undergrad there at the time.
They turned up from the Science Research Council (before Engineering crept in) and were followed by a couple Sun-1 workstations and a Sirius PC.
I think they were originally billed as Smalltalk machines though I am not sure how they ended up after ICL got to them. Though it could be that the Computer Science department wanted them for other stuff than other users …
The 68000 is just a more-or-less revamped PDP-11, though this is not to belittle it, as the PDP-11 is one of the greatest (if not the greatest) CPU designs ever IMHO.
The 68000 hit the streets in 1981/2 which was already behind Intel’s 8086/8 which had started coming on stream at the end of the 70’s and were therefore more widespread.
It’s a shame, as the Intel legacy has been, and continues to be, such a millstone that nobody can get rid of. Intel tried twice, once with iAXP32 and the again with Itanium. Both failed miserably having cost huge amounts.
Worse still the i86 family didn’t get any better until the 386. The 186 was the all in one system on a chip that should have been the obvious choice for building PCs, but it was as flawed as the 286 which IBM did use in its PC-AT. It’s virtual memory model was broken and only fixed to become usable in the 386 - the days of memory extenders were finally over.
But by that time the software investment was too great to switch - only the non MS world could take advantage of better processors or build their own - Apple, Apollo, Sun, Stratus, Tandem, Perq to name but a few, now all fallen by the wayside.
Although the 68000 did have a proper virtual memory co-chip its arrival was too late to stem the wave of the IBM PC and its clones.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions …
Proper computer science is just a specialised branch of maths :-)
The Donald showed us that.
Do students still study things like Taylor series and numerical and operational analysis, or have we consigned them to ‘just include this library’ ?
However, maths is not enough if you actually want to build a computer as engineering ≠ maths.
A fully fledged FORTH implementation does everything including its own disk I/O.
I wrote a FORTH interpreter/compiler whatever you call it for the 8086 in assembler and it came in at under 8KB - which at the time was a big plus when memory was more expensive than programmers.
FORTH - quirky definitely, elegant yes in lots of places, but maintainable, usable .... not so sure :)
You don't need object oriented FORTRAN, or ever will .... as we knew in 1982
"The market for this was big enough that several companies were making dedicated versions of this chip with the Basic interpreter masked into ROM on the chip itself...."
Hey that was me - for one of them at least !
Cramming a Tiny BASIC interpreter coded into 4K of ROM on an 8051 in 1982. Took me a week to reorganise my assembly code to get down from 4099 bytes to 4095 in the end.... those were the days
Sauerkraut and Rhineland wines are wonderful .. sounds like you just haven’t experienced good ones.
As for aristocracy the choices are limited - Hapsburgs, Bourbons, Glukcksbergs who are all related anyway, so hardly specifically German or a choice.
And then there are Messrs Hilbert, Reinmann, Gödel, Gauss, Krebs and Koch, to name but a few...
FFS read some history and at least get the basic facts correct
The Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, took the UK into the EEC in January 1973.
The referendum of 1975, under Wislon's government, who backed leave, was whether or not to continue to stay in Europe.
The electorate expressed significant support for EC membership, with 67% in favour on a national turnout of 64%.
The referendum result was not legally binding - because referenda / ums are not, they are public opinion polls to assist parliament - however, it was widely accepted that the vote would be politically binding on future Westminster Parliaments.
FFS do a bit of research - Thatcher did not take the UK into Europe. You will find that there are about 10 years between these events.
As for extortion, you will also find that every EU member has their own form of 'special deal' - the UK is not the first nor the last. Read the details of the Common Agricultural Policy - it would be hilarious if it were not so tragic and wasteful.
But you're right about the pound of flesh - the UK has unfortunately shown that not only has the EU project lost its way, it also shows little intention of reforming and engaging with the population to find it again.
You must be prepared for the consequences if you call somebody's bluff and they actually do what they said they would *. So yes - having exposed the arrogance and short-sightedness of the EU commission by showing them to having failed has no doubt made them somewhat upset.
Tusk and Junckers are pissed as they have managed to lose parts of the empire almost single handedly by refusing to acknowledge issues that almost all member states are grappling with.
A better solution would have been to adopt the Hungarian position, ignore democratic process and just impose whatever measures were felt necessary and wait for the EU to throw the UK out - it probably would never have happened.
But in a way it could possibly be the best thing that could have happened to the EU - assuming that they recognise and do something about it. Otherwise expect this departure to be a starting point.
Said with an incredibly heavy heart as somebody who truly wants a European project to succeed and hoped it would never have got this far.
But without destruction there is rarely reinvention ....
* That also goes for the numpties that called the UK referendum without a plan if the 'wrong result' ever happened.
"after encouragement from Jo Johnson, the Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, who was naturally chuffed ..."
.. at being able to take credit for something he was not involved in, nor had to fork out any money for, while still being able to neglect the rest of the system that piles huge amount of debt onto young people ...
But but but Brexit will solve it all for us of course .... and world hunger while it's at it.
Even the basics are being lost.
For around 10 years, dragging a photo onto the mail icon used to open up a new message with the photo in it - now we have mice with multi buttons I am forced to go via a crappy pop-up menu hierarchy to the 'share' options or play with cut and paste if my app is not in the list - assuming it feels like it.
And don't get me started on what a pile of crap Preview has become - trying to save a file under a different name now involves duplicating and renaming or exporting or some other nonsense - what was wrong with 'Save' and 'Save as' - which BTW appear in all other applications.
Moaning about iTunes doesn't count as it's been crap for so long and every new release means you can't do what you did in the last one - assuming that you can find anything again.
The simple intuitive gestures are disappearing on the desktop and being replaced by menus and stuff you have to read - and are often inaccessible via keyboard shortcuts.
Seems like they've moved on to another of Orwell's classics ..
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
But generally you find that the code is more or less English with comments in French.
Variables and function names usually end up as some kind of Franglais.
Sometimes you get a fully blown 100% French set of code. However, this is still quite rare especially when compared to Spanish where often everything tends to be in Spanish.
And finally there are local home grown things - I remember that there used to be 'LTR' - Langage Temps-Réel that was promoted by defence companies such as Thomson and Aerospatiale in much the same way as CHILL and CORAL-66 were done here.
In the cloud .. you must be joking ... you have never had to deal with the French taxman.
Everything has to be available as hardcopy for umpteen years - or else another 'fine' opportunity - often in dodecaplicate and stamped by some other government authority whose office is only open between 10 - 11am on the 4th Tuesday of the month if it has an R in it ... and no you can't email it
Having recently had to deal with French govt and financial institutions again, I had forgotten just how bad and bureaucratic everything is .... UK is a paragon of efficiency and helpfulness in comparison
But unlike most of the others, Teslas actually look like cars you'd want to drive and (certainly for the Model-S) have enough room to fit stuff in them - including people.
But convincing people to pay twice as much for something that doesn't go as far and is more inconvenient to refuel when away from home is still difficult. For £30k you can get an equivalent sized vehicle and at current UK prices (high compared to other countries) still have enough to travel over 100k miles.
Unless petrol prices rise significantly (unlikely until the oil producers have had a good go at putting shale and other competition out of business) or battery technology improves by orders of magnitude, electric vehicles will unfortunately remain toys for the rich.
Doesn't mean to say I don't want one :-)
Well as it used to be called Sybase ( version 7 II think but it is a long time ago) and it used to run happily on all manner of operating systems except Windows until MS got their mitts on it, the Unix / Linux code is probably hidden down the back of the sofa somewhere....
You don't need to go that far.
Once you've given in to one government why shouldn't other countries demand the same for their 'terrorist' or 'crimes against the state' cases ?
On the list of national agencies you'd trust to do the right thing the FBI is (unlikely as it may seem) pretty high on the list in a relative way.
So Mr Apple you can do this for the US but not for us ? Some nice looking market share and shops you have there, wouldn't want anything to happen to them would you ...
Errr ... All the laws of thermodynamics apply to EVERYTHING ....
1st law : You cannot win.
2nd law : You cannot break even
3rd law : You cannot quit the game
IIRC Ivar Jacobson has a small section entitled Software Entropy in one of his books ... But then again analysis and design is old hat these days ...
That and the "I can do table joins in memory quicker than the database" brigade by reading the contents of two tables into memory and then looping over them ...
Yes very good, until it went live and failed in the first 20s when presented with the 4+ million records in the initial load table ...
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