* Posts by Dan 55

16887 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009

ZX Spectrum Vega+ blows a FUSE: It runs open-source emulator

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Jonathan Who?

Screenshots and videos show they seem to be pretty uninspired copies of the 80s games, and as people are interested in the Vega for the nostalgia factor, wouldn't it be better for them to play the originals which mean something to them?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 98% ZX Spectrum look a like

You can switch the output from RF to composite with a simple hack in the modulator.

Dan 55 Silver badge

XP abstracted stuff, but made it difficult to learn and understand PCs.

Before you had to learn about PCs, even though they were pointlessly more complicated than e.g. Amigas or STs.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: but that's the same as everyone elses review!

Not sure she's going to answer. The Twitter account is now locked and the Facebook page has disappeared. The online shop is still there though, selling products branded with a brand they don't have the rights to any more.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FUSE?

It was, until they left.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Nothing wrong with FUSE

The emulator developed by Smith and Andrews seems pretty good, at least on YouTube. When they left RCL, they took it with them.

RCL then had to find someone else, and went to Planet Computers. They took FUSE and hacked around with it but, for whatever reason, it wasn't finished.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Sir Clive's health

Yes, RCL throwing the old man under a bus because he's outlived his usefulness. So nice of them.

Dan 55 Silver badge

I'd say PCs made much less sense to get working, until Windows XP and then they became too complicated to understand.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FUSE?

Planet Computers stopped development last October, there has been no work on the firmware since then. Seems there was no money, no time due to the Gemini launch, or RCL and Planet Computers fell out.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: FUSE?

It was originally planned to custom firmware, this video, from eleven minutes onwards.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Not really. If the ZX computers kickstarted the British home computer market and taught a generation in the early 80s, they couldn't have been that crap.

Dan 55 Silver badge

A solid number 2?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Why Sir Clive Sinclair’s corporate shareholder in RCL, Sinclair Research Ltd, has not intervened is a source of ongoing confusion

If SRL voted with Andrews and Smith to kick Levy & Co. out and take their place, that would mean they have to spend money winding RCL up and become responsible for the debt while trading insolvent and possibly whatever else Levy's done in everyone's absence.

I guess Clive couldn't be arsed with that.

ZX Spectrum reboot latest: Some Vega+s arrive, Sky pulls plug, Clive drops ball

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: No QWERTY

That'll do so well for The Hobbit, Elite, or Skool Daze.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What we need

BUT: Z80 version at Amstrad (Schneider) is totally different story. It is just faster/stronger machine.

Nobbled by memory contention and the Z80 not having enough grunt to deal with the amount of video memory in the higher res/colour screen modes.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What we need

I used to have that view, but years later found out that 6502 page zero access was treated specially and very fast, effectively giving another 256 registers.

But then again you have to do stuff like reset the carry flag before operations meaning the code size was bigger, and there were fewer conditional jump commands available after you'd done your operation.

That kind of stuff would get old quickly (as you can guess I learnt Z80 assembly).

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It looks a bit... "cheap"

And what was the price of the Apple II, TRS-80, and PET?

Dan 55 Silver badge

It's not of value. They shouldn't be able to use the ROM either, that belongs to Sky.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: You've only got yourselves to blame.....

Say what you like, Sinclair never delivered something this useless two years late.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What we need

the 2MHz 6502 in the BBC performed tasks faster than the 3.75 MHz in a Spectrum.

The memory access was also more simple for 6502, which enabled it to work with slower memory than the Z80, mainly because memory and CPU clock speeds were linked together.

The BBC had 4Mhz memory multiplexed between the 2Mhz CPU and the video display, so the CPU always never had to wait to access the memory.

The Electron on the other hand had the same 2Mhz CPU but used a contended memory model (similar to the Spectrum). When the video output needed to access the memory, the CPU was paused. On the Electron this meant the machine was pretty slow, far slower than BBC and slower the Spectrum. Unlike the Spectrum, it had no uncontended RAM area.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It looks a bit... "cheap"

This is the most thorough review I've found so far.

So, rather glad I decided not to go for it.

It's a phone with a peel, but you'll have to wait a bit more for retro Nokia

Dan 55 Silver badge

Well there we go, a good idea strangled at birth by Google loading its smorgasbord of slurping shit onto it.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Wasp T12 Speechtool

You were obviously downvoted by someone who never saw a 3650, 7600, or 7610.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The N8 could be charged through USB, although it drew 500mA max. Charging through the Nokia charge port was faster.

Dan 55 Silver badge

The counterfeit models lack the Nokia branding and make use of a deprecated OS such as Symbian.

They may have the Harmattan/Belle look (later ripped off by Samsung) but I really doubt it's Symbian under the hood. But if they are, they'd be worth buying...

Bank on it: It's either legal to port-scan someone without consent or it's not, fumes researcher

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Halifax Bank has been to touch to say

... canned PR bollocks.

And El Reg should have said that they did not address the question instead of quoting them.

Almost 1 in 3 Brits think they lack computer skills to do their jobs well

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Just wait until all the old people die off

I'm usually taking the mickey when I use that subject line, but here I'm not. Surely the figure will increase above 89% as the 70 and 80 year olds who have never used computers drop off their perches, and nearly everyone who is alive will have had some computer experience?

Is going from not using a computer to using a computer badly an improvement?

Dear alt-right morons and other miscreants: Disrupt DEF CON, and the goons will 'ave you

Dan 55 Silver badge

What's in it for them?

Why do they want to disrupt hacker conferences... Is this the modern-day book-burning?

Riddle me this: TypeScript's latest data type is literally unknown

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: void *

Which suffers from the same problems and could be fixed in the same way if it weren't part of stdlib.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: void *

Nobody's talking about overloading. If you are juggling a bunch of void * variables about and calling a bunch of functions which accept void *s, or you are forced to cast to void * in the function call, you can pass the wrong variable to the wrong function. However, if you define the function to accept an opaque structure pointer instead of a void * then the compiler will enforce type checking and you can't make that mistake.

Or you don't understand why void* exists and why its sometimes required as a function parameter.

Okay, so tell me why I'm wrong and what your example is.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: void *

You can just as well use an opaque structure instead of void *, it makes the code more readable and unlike void *s the compiler makes sure variables aren't passed to the wrong function.

And that works with callbacks too. You don't even need to cast it to something else in the callback code, just define the structure fully instead of opaquely in that .c file.

Dan 55 Silver badge

void *

There's a new data type, called unknown, that differs from another catch-all data type, called any. "Unlike any, unknown is assignable to almost nothing else without a type assertion," explains Rosenwasser. "You also can’t access any properties off of an unknown, nor can you call/construct them."

In my experience, whenever there is a question, and void * is the answer, either the answer is wrong or the question is wrong.

Facebook deletes 17 accounts, dusts off hands, beams: We've saved the 2018 elections

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: What about the rest?

If they haven't calculated each post's hash it's because they don't want to. They do it with images.

Think tank calls for post-Brexit national ID cards: The kids have phones so what's the difference?

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's quite funny

"the only country in Europe not to have ID cards"

What?

Dan 55 Silver badge
Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: No mention...

Stripping you of your citizenship is exactly what they do. You then have to jump through hoops to get it back as well as give up your aquired nationality.

The internet's very own Muslim ban continues: DNS overlord insists it can freeze dot-words

Dan 55 Silver badge

What'll happen is they'll each be run by the other lot, and they'll post Truthy News™. Or Alex Jones will get them.

And that is why gTLDs are crap.

Microsoft devises new way of making you feel old: Windows NT is 25

Dan 55 Silver badge

In the early days (i.e. their quick and dirty BASIC that they flogged to all and sundry), Micro-Soft was a thing in copyright notices but as someone mentioned above the logo was all in capitals.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Just out of interest, does ReactOS run the software?

You want to know which is the best smartphone this season? Tbh, it's tricky to tell 'em apart

Dan 55 Silver badge

Well try a Nokia 2 (5") or Nokia 3.1 (5.2") then.

UK 'fake news' inquiry calls for end to tech middleman excuses, election law overhaul

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Beware ...

I have no idea why repeated viewing of terrorist material should be illegal, yet Facebook and YouTube can keep it up there indefinitely.

The only reasons that come to mind are a) MPs have been lobbied by Google, Facebook, b) civil servants don't know how to draft the laws, or c) the data will be used to compile watchlists.

a) requires a less corrupt democratic system, b) PPE and classics graduates have no idea about anything technical, and in this age this is unworkable and they must get outside expertise in, or c) that doesn't work for preventing radicalisation, people get radicalised anyway, there are too many to keep tabs on, the material must simply get taken down.

Tech Shutdown Blows: IT chaos cost Brit bank TSB almost £200m

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's gonna cost more than that...

If you're referring to their "customer service" table, it's seems like an incomplete list, there aren't many banks in that.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: It's gonna cost more than that...

Wouldn't the most important factor in looking for a new bank if you're a TSB customer be reliability, not interest rates? Unfortunately they never got round to putting that table on Moneysupermarket.

FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week

Dan 55 Silver badge

"If a massive manufacturer like Samsung can't get security right..."

Samsung shouldn't be trusted with software:

Security Researcher Finds 40 Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in Samsung’s Tizen OS

The Formal Code Review

Enlightened (need a free hour to read all this)

Another German state plans switch back from Linux to Windows

Dan 55 Silver badge
Meh

Re: @mpentler "..... but your ideologies can't even fathom that possibility..."

What one has to take into account here is that the anti-Redmond hatebois cannot conceive of any honest reason for preferring Windows under any circumstances.

I can, but only up to and including Windows 7.

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: The problem is not Linux itself...

So ... what is going on?

Politics. Another SPD-CDU coalition has decided to migrate to Windows, this time before the cost-benefit analysis has even come out (wonder who's going to write that one anyway):

Windows scores a win over Linux as another state decides to switch

The Munich decision was made by the city's ruling coalition of the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and centre-right Christian Social Union (CSU), a party that only operates in Bavaria, and that is the long-running junior partner to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU).

Again, Lower Saxony is governed by an SPD-CDU coalition, which was formed last year with an agreement that included turning the state's back on Linux. Other administrative departments there, including the police, are already using a Windows 8.1-based client developed by a local company.

Lower Saxony's tax authority will now conduct a cost-benefit analysis on the migration. The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), which is highly critical of the decision to turn away from Linux, welcomed the procedural formality, but program manager Max Mehl said it was important to keep an eye on who conducts the analysis.

The Munich migration followed the recommendations of a report from consultants at Accenture, a Microsoft partner.

"It is already apparent that the desired consolidation of the IT landscape is going in the wrong direction," said Mehl. "Instead of taking the chance to expand the existing infrastructure of Linux systems, the state voluntarily goes back into a cage of artificial dependencies from individual manufacturers."

Mehl pointed to Lower Saxony's neighbour, Schleswig-Holstein, for an example of a more "future-oriented IT strategy". Schleswig Holstein has been governed since last year by a 'Jamaica' coalition of the CDU, the Greens, and the liberal Free Democrats (the party colours of which match the Jamaican flag), which decided last month to go in entirely the opposite direction, abandoning Windows for free software.

Is it OK if we call $53bn-a-quarter Amazon the Bit Barns and Ignoble?

Dan 55 Silver badge

not content with that transaction the consumer electronics companies want to monetize you further'

Maybe it's not so bad, look at Facebook's shares after CA and GDPR was introduced. Looks like quite a few people are deciding they don't like the look of that.

Windows 10 Insiders see double as new builds hit the deck – with promises to end Update Rage

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: 'The not-at-all creepy technology will try and predict if a user has left the machine unattended

Seems like they can call updating at night and leaving it during the day AI now...

Nobody has a bloody clue

Dan 55 Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Nobody has a bloody clue

Didn't you know Whatsapp and iMessage need the phone to send stronger bits through TCP/IP?

You can take off the shades, squinting Outlook.com users. It has gone dark. Very dark

Dan 55 Silver badge

Re: Outlook, the last bastion of weird customization hackery

There's a weird customization option that does nothing more than put a little watermark on your ribbon, eg a little swirl. Maybe 10-12 choices here. But for the love of god, why?

If it were user definable, I could put the design that best suits the kind of corporate e-mail I receive, i.e. Munch's The Scream. However it isn't, so I just leave it blank.