Posts by Anonymous Prime

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

Re: "amid growing adoption of competing architectures"

not sure if sarcasm or not.....

BOFH: The Hypochondriac Boss and the non-random sample

>>I started to read Simon's stories during my formative years.

If I had discovered BOFH during my college years (when I worked as a computer lab assistant, teaching Word 6(66) to students who barely knew how to type and had waited 'til the eleventh hour to start writing their reports) I'd be in prison.

Yahoo! couldn't! detect! hackers! in! its! network! but! can! spot! NSFW! smut! in! your! office?

Re: Meh

FTFY:

'Hence, "A technical solution for XXX" is an easy sell.']

Toshiba flashes 100TB QLC flash drive, may go on sale within months. Really

Re: "Quad Level Cell (QLC)"

>>Or they may do a repeat and have "Five Level Cell (FLC)" and do the +1 bit on the six-banger, as otherwise it will have a collision with Single Level Cell.

HLC (Hex Level Cell).

Seven is the real challenge. Best I can come up with is ZLC (Yiddish's "zibn"). But we probably have plenty of time to come up with something better before such things actually get to market.

The developer died 14 years ago, here's a print out of his source code

Re: Portrayal of computer tech guys in films/tv.

>>When I watch medical things, I've no idea what they're talking about most of the time, but it sounds 'about right' and fits in with the flow of things...

My sister works for a medical test collection company-- they take the test tubes from the hospitals and clinics, process them and send them out to the appropriate labs. She loved 'House MD', but would scream stuff like "No, you can't do that test in 15 minutes! There's exactly one lab that does that test and they're in Minnesota! You'd be lucky to get it back in 15 DAYS!"

BOFH: Thermo-electric funeral

Peltier CPU cooler

My first "Mac"-- a Radius 81/110 (back from those brief days when Apple allowed a couple of companies to make Mac clones) had a Peltier device on its CPU. Can't imagine why that didn't catch on.

(well, besides that whole makes-more-heat-than-it-removes issue.)

Welcome to the family ... Microsoft licks nib of Surface pen maker N-trig

How does N-trig compare to Wacom?

I snatched up a Surface Pro (v1) on clearance when the SP2's came out. It replaced an old Toshiba Tablet PC I used for drawing in Photoshop. In both cases, the Wacom-based pen is mostly okay but a little off around the corners and edges.

Forget viruses: Evil USB drive 'fries laptops with a power surge'

RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS

>>Didn't BOFH do this many years back? Except with a Laptop full of batteries?

From "The Bastard Goes to the Trade Show":

"The 31 hefty nicad batteries that make up almost the entire inside of my 'laptop' pour grunt into a tripling inverter which in turn supplies RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS to alternate pins on the 'SCSI' bus, whilst emitting a dull 'uuurk' sound."

I'm still waiting for the opportunity to use the phrase "RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS" somewhere in my life. This doesn't count.

10 PRINT "Happy 50th Birthday, BASIC" : GOTO 10

Re: C

re: (* Seriously. Been there, done that. 6809 circa 1980.)

I've done something like that. 6809 on a Tandy CoCo3, early 1990s. I had bought an assembly-language tutorial book at Radio Shack, but was unable to get EDTASM, which it was written for. Luckily, the book had a table of opcodes, as well as object code printouts in all its code examples, so I taught myself how to hand-assemble.

I did all that to try to get some resemblance of speed out of the CoCo3's "hi-res" graphics modes (a whopping 320x200 in 16 colors). The stock HGET and HPUT blitter commands were way too slow (which is what happens when the original programmers' properly "structured" program calls 3 subroutines for each byte it's copying to the frame buffer). I also added transparency and horizontal & vertical flipping. And tile-based backgrounds. And double-buffering. I never actually did built the game I wanted to make; I had more fun building the tools. (for certain definitions of "fun".)

Forget the beach 'n' boardwalk, check out the Santa Cruz STEVE JOBS FOUNTAIN

I like XKCD's tribute: a spinning beach ball. "There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return."

Another interpretation I've read: "Steve Jobs is no longer responding to external events."

The Commodore 64 is 30

I wish

Pfft-- I had a CoCo 2 and 3, and while the 6809 was a superior 8-bit CPU (it was able to do some 16-bit ops), it was entirely on its own. No sprite chip-- I taught myself assembly to create a screaming fast (compared to the stock CoCo3 BASIC HGET/HPUT ) blitter. It could do transparency, even. "Audio" meant plugging values into a particular address (linked to a 6-bit DAC) at regular intervals (no DMA here), so forget about playing any sound more complex than blips and clicks if you want to do anything else at the same time.

Illicit Bitcoin miners steal resources from infected Macs

Graphic Converter? Really?

Who the hell needs to torrent GC? That's shareware. And unless they changed something recently, you don't even really need the serial #-- you just have to wait a minute after you launch it if it's not registered. And you can find pirated serials if really want to.

Computer Engineer Barbie coming soon to a toy store near you

addendum(b)

Dang-- I forgot about the matching cattle prod, portable bulk eraser, and etherkiller.

Also-- no comment as to what the "B" in "BOFH Barbie" might stand for.

<BZZZRT> Tee-hee-hee!

Fear the BOFH Barbie, with her "laptop" whose insides are just a bunch of ni-cads and an inverter wired to all its ports.

Aussie net censorship turning Chinese

Re: The Sex Party

I'm reminded of this:

http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly050420a.htm

Also, @ Tali Walker: Sure, they'll be Entirely Free as long as they're still permitted to read about how Not Entirely Free they really are; yeah, that makes sense. Right.

Adobe heats up iPad Flash bash

Flash kills batteries dead

Although there is some political wrangling and corporate pissing-matches going on here, I think the lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad is mostly due to the fact that Flash is so CPU-intensive, it kills battery life:

http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitchy-over-the-iphone-and-flash-bit

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/a0cqa/fight_for_flash_on_the_iphone_gets_dirty/

"The [Flash] prototype allowed the iPhone to have less than half an hour of battery life using flash."

A version of Flash that uses the GPU might be easier on the battery, but that would require actual effort on Adobe's part.

Not that I have any need for an iPad at the moment (I had hoped for a full-fledged Tablet PC that could run OS X and Photoshop, but I'll just have to limp along with my XP tablet for a bit longer).

BOFH: The Silence of the Servers

@Yarrow Paddon-Butler

What do you mean "ever so slightly"?

Check out the original BOFH episodes; he's actually mellowed somewhat in recent years.

http://bofh.ntk.net/