* Posts by Blue Pumpkin

154 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007

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It is 20 years since the last commercial flight of Concorde

Blue Pumpkin

Re: 3 experiences with Concorde

As a kid I remember the Concorde maiden flight from Tolouse. Followed not much later by the humungous - at the time - launch of the 747. It was a great time for planes :-)

There is also a Concorde at the Seattle Museum of Flight at Boeing Field, that you can walk through. And as you say it's tiny. In addition there is also a walk through of a previous version of Air Force One - maybe 707 based - I don't remember - someone will tell me.

All in all a great place to go - a whole day will not be enough.

And if you're there, the visit to Boeing at Everett is just awesome, a cathedral of engineering prowess.

Though I guess there are no more 747s

CERN swaps out databases to feed its petabyte-a-day habit

Blue Pumpkin

It’s all just dust …

From browser brat to backend boss: Will WASM win the web wars?

Blue Pumpkin

Even though the Empire standardised on the Universal Interface and Protocol as embodied by R2D2 it's just a bigger island, so you still have to lug around a bunch of C3POs to get anything to talk to anything ....

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

Blue Pumpkin

Re: I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom

Tastefully decked out with demotivational posters from despair.com …..

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Blue Pumpkin
Unhappy

And there was I thinking ...

it was something novel like getting the iDevice to scan the vinyl directly into the music library with it's super-duper integrated laser and beam it round the house.

But would the iTurn be more expensive than Jonny Ives Linn version ?

Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Good old Brexit

No - it’s the gift that keeps on taking …

Unidentified object on Australian beach may be part of Indian rocket launcher

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Is it anything like this?

Looks like Rover, Number 6 ….

Quirky QWERTY killed a password in Paris

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Faux AZERTY

Oh yes talking to VAXen with a German keyboard where C and Y are swapped ....

Ctrl-Y and Ctrl-C not doing the same things .... the number of times I killed myself ....

Want to feel old? Ethernet just celebrated its 50th birthday

Blue Pumpkin

Aloha...

Though after 50 years Mahalo seems more fitting ...

AI is going to eat itself: Experiment shows people training bots are using bots

Blue Pumpkin

Dark Star already told us what happens ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luaRtGn2tsI

Robot can rip the data out of RAM chips with chilling technology

Blue Pumpkin

Mille sabords ….

… is that you Capitaine Haddock ?

Singapore tells its people: Go forth and block those ads

Blue Pumpkin

Re: ScamShield privacy concerns

So no different to the "land of the free" and upholder of world wide dumbmocracy

Chinese company claims it's built batteries so dense they can power electric airplanes

Blue Pumpkin

Crazy, the distance is ~650km.

A current high speed train could do that in 3 hours - competitive with the plane given all the faffing around at airports as you point out.

And with a much higher density of around 800 to 1000 passengers per train.

And a much higher frequency - you can do at least 4 trains per hour if not more.

Not forgetting the added bonus of not being in a plane.

However, an overnight sleeper does have its charms, though usually at a price.

LLaMA drama as Meta's mega language model leaks

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Question?

I think Delphi has been involved in information, misinformation, prediction and wishful thinking for quite some time .... as well as being home to Python.

What goes around comes around ...

Apple releases Lisa source code on landmark machine's 40th birthday

Blue Pumpkin

Re: ICL / Three Rivers PERQ

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 …

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Architecture and Morality.....anyone?

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 …

You can hook your MIDI keyboard up to a website with Firefox 108

Blue Pumpkin

CANYON.MID

It's like Keith Emerson just turned up .... the things you forget ....

More and more CS students are interested in AI – and there aren't enough lecturers

Blue Pumpkin

Re: more CS students are interested in AI

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.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Jupiter ACE

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 :)

An open-source COBOL contender emerges

Blue Pumpkin

Re: "COBOL-2002, which introduced object oriented programming"

You don't need object oriented FORTRAN, or ever will .... as we knew in 1982

https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/realmen.html

You should read Section 8 of the Unix User's Manual

Blue Pumpkin

Re: I'm always pleased when BSD get a mention

Your loss.

As they say learning another language - whatever it happens to be - gives you another viewpoint from which to appreciate the world (though I admit I may not be deal with CICS !)

Faster Python: Mark Shannon, author of newly endorsed plan, speaks to The Register

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Or...

"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

The Epic vs Apple trial is wrapping up, but the battle has just begun

Blue Pumpkin

Re: The lawyers have more paydays coming

Except, if I understand correctly, the purchase price is zero. So Apple hosts and distributes effectively for nothing.

Thus it is not unreasonable to take a cut of in-app purchases.

'Biggest data grab' in NHS history stuffs GP records in a central store for 'research' – and the time to opt out is now

Blue Pumpkin

Re: gp records centrally

Ha ! ID

This is the UK. We've heard about that, it's a thing foreigners do.

We have gas bills.

Texan's alleged Amazon bombing effort fizzles: Militia man wanted to take out 'about 70 per cent of the internet'

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Coat... needed... when the temperature drops----->>>>

A trip to Newcastle should set you right.

And also discover the right to bare legs ...

The JavaScript ecosystem is 'hopelessly fragmented'... so here is another runtime: Deno is now a company

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Curses

Hey Forth again stay to back is

Though not on anybody’s list.

Just think how much more effective those node / deno / done / edon could be if they had documentation.

Old school I know ... a bit like design documents....

React team observes that running everything on the client can be costly, aims to fix it with Server Components

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Client / server architectures

And if you stay long enough you'll meet them several times round.

Each time with a "brand new, totally innovative, never before seen" sticker on them ....

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Blue Pumpkin

Re: What have the Germans ever done for us?

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...

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Intel spokesperson quote

Indeed, they were there with the 2901 when I was just about out of short trousers :-)

OK I exaggerate a bit but in the 80's it was a thing ... Apollo anyone ?

Could an AI android live forever? What, like your other IT devices?

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Bill Nelson's mind-bending rarity Map of Dreams

Life in the air-age, it’s grim enough to make a robot cry ....

Vulture gets claws on Lego's latest Apollo nostalgia-fest

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Next!

And the lunar lander !!

WikiLeaks boss Assange acted as a foreign spy, Uncle Sam exclaims in fresh rap sheet

Blue Pumpkin
FAIL

Re: I was fine with the first indictment

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.

Turn on, tune in, cash out: Hipster chat plat Slack whacks beardie millennials with features

Blue Pumpkin

I liked it better when it was IRC ...

Microsoft liberates ancient MS-DOS source from the museum and sticks it in GitHub

Blue Pumpkin
Devil

Re: Another shot of Code

PL/M was provided by Intel as part of their MDS - Microprocessor Development Systems - that provided compilation and debug tools for the processors.

A sort of Pascal Algolly thing - I preferred assembler :-)

30-up: You know what? Those really weren't the days

Blue Pumpkin

Umm ...

Like the week I spent trying to optimise 4101 bytes of 8051 assembler code so that it would fit into the 4096 bytes of ROM ... maybe not

Do I hear two million dollars? Apple-1 fossil goes on the block, cassettes included

Blue Pumpkin
Thumb Up

Re: What's actually more interresting is how those early text modes worked

Oh yes ... the Cheap Video Cookbook served me well and is still hanging about somewhere, probably next to the FORTH book ...

Programming with a soldering iron, those were days ...

Time to ditch the front door key? Nest's new wireless smart lock is surprisingly convenient

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Why's it mounted on the door?

Or embed terminals in the deadlock to make contact with those in the box mounted on the frame / wall.

FYI: Processor bugs are everywhere – just ask Intel and AMD

Blue Pumpkin

Re: "...Microsoft senior engineer Dan Luu..."

These are not the Minecrafts you are looking for. They already have the technology and that technology is Powerpoint :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8

The accompanying paper is also a good read.

Oracle caves, promises to crack open Java EE as v8 crawls ever closer

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Half dead

Yes but as half-lives are exponential it will still be around for a while.

A bit like all those other 'dead' languages we hear about ... FORTRAN, C, COBOL, BASIC, VB, Python 2, ADA, PL/1, smalltalk, et al.

Oh snap! UK Prime Minister Theresa May calls June election

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Breaking news:

Shirley May 9th - why waste so much energy ?

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Of course they won't listen

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.

Pong, anyone? How about Pong on a vintage oscilloscope?

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Kudos for the effort....

This is the article you are looking for

http://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1976/Poptronics-1976-04.pdf

page 35 onwards :-)

Somebody has done a sterling job of OCR-ing the whole lot into PDFs for your joy and delectation.

Minnesota, Illinois rebel over America's ISP privacy massacre, mull fresh info protections

Blue Pumpkin

Re: Minnesotan here!

But surely that's only because all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average ?

This AI stuff is all talk! Bots invent their own language to natter away behind humans' backs

Blue Pumpkin

Re: An infinite number of bots with typewriters

The quality of mercy is not strnen ...

.. with thanks to the Mekons

This goldfish and its steerable robot tank will destroy humanity

Blue Pumpkin

Nature vs nurture ?

It always stays in the corner ...

.. presumably trying to get the thing to go round in circles

It's now 2017, and your Windows PC can still be pwned by a Word file

Blue Pumpkin
Trollface

Re: Meanwhile, Adobe is updating blah de fucking blah

I have it on good authority that the number of patches exceeded the number of lines of source code several years ago and now they just release useless patches so that people don't forget who they are ...

James Dyson's new startup: A university for engineers that doesn't suck

Blue Pumpkin

Phase 6 : Reward for the uninvolved

"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.

Nicole forces NASA resupply into Sunday launch: Crew must wait for their packet soup

Blue Pumpkin
Unhappy

Re: I can imagine the conversation now...

cf: Baldrick's tea in Black Adder IV ...

Is Apple's software getting worse or what?

Blue Pumpkin
Unhappy

It's downhill all the way ...

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.

iPhone 7's Qualcomm, Intel soap opera dumps a carrier lock-out on us

Blue Pumpkin

That old saying ...

"CPU benchmarks are like statistics: to paraphrase an old saying, 'there are lies, damned lies, and benchmarks'," Mark Hung, a Gartner research veep, told The Register this week.

What he meant to say was 'there are lies, damned lies, and Gartner'

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