Posts by ThomH

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

So those CAPTCHA-esque prompts will now proceed from "Are you human?" to "No, but seriously though. A human? Really??!? Haven't seen your kind in a while round these parts."

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

Re: Dangerous thing you've got there....

> I don't think courts will buy that final argument about expecting a service not to break the law

The final argument was that you'd have to seriously consider liability for the AI companies if they don't treat requests as by default constrained by the law.

I don't think courts would have a problem with that.

Re: Dangerous thing you've got there....

> Who would the courts find should be held accountable for breaking the law, if it came to that?

I guess nobody in this case; at no point did somebody commit the illegal act while intending to commit the illegal act. It'd be more similar to something like a mechanical failure, where the operator of a device wanted to do one thing but the device failed and did another. That is, assuming the court genuinely believed that the acts the AI bot took were unintended by the human in control. If he knew or should have known the agent would commit an illegal act, as if things like this become widespread, that'd be different. But then you'd have to wonder about the AI companies, since "... and don't do anything illegal" is usually implicit when you're using a company to perform a service...

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

Re: It's still not hard to do.

I'm ex-Google and still instinctively look at people's belts when I hold a door open for them. It makes me feel very foolish.

The Virtual OS Museum opens its doors

> Downloading now ...

I'm endeavouring to, but the archive.org download just keeps timing out. Would recommend the torrent for anybody that intends to download this but has not yet.

User found the perfect formula to make Excel misbehave

Re: Maths

I tend to go with "what if you got an extra 100% when you put money in, but when you withdraw any you have to give away 100%?".

YouTuber lands on Moon using a ZX Spectrum. Conditions apply

Re: C64

Digressive, but I was just looking at the disassembly of the Thomson MO5's implementation of tape loading via equivalent hardware and it's more elegant, being just regular single-density-disk-style FM, i.e. within a fixed time period a 1 is two level transitions but a 0 is only one level transition. So:

1. wait for a transition in the input in either direction;

2. wait for 2/3rds of the standard bit length;

3. sample tape input again once — if it's the same as it was at (1) then collect a 0, otherwise collect a 1;

4. go back to (1)

It's really beautiful. And I don't think I'm just saying that because the only commented version I could find is entirely in French.

Re: C64

The disk interface is a whole tragedy of hardware errors leading up to the need to bit bang, but the tape interface is entirely the fault of the software people. The hardware is actually fairly competent on that: respective to a square wave on a cassette, an interrupt is generated on every leading edge and there's a separate hardware timer. Obviously there's a decent bit of latency if you go that route but it's not especially problematic and polling is also an option.

Bits aren't encoded optimally given that scheme but here's the really big blunder: every file is recored on tape... twice. Commodore's means of error _detection_ is to read all data twice and see whether it matched. And there's no checksum or CRC so, again, this is strictly _detection_. No error correction. If, after spending twice as long as it needs to on reading data it hasn't done so perfectly for the entire run then bad luck.

Whereas e.g. Acorn broke all on-tape files into 256-byte chunks with an individual CRC. If the loading of any single chunk failed, you could rewind and retry just that part. Other micros tended to have simpler checksum schemes and weren't necessarily able to deal with retrying just part of a file... but at least none of them decided to store the entirety of your files _twice_.

Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint

Re: Never saw the point

If you don't understand what was so fantastic about 640x256 pixels with no effect on CPU speed, a full-quality keyboard, both television and RGB monitor support, various ports dedicated to what we'd now call GPIO, and even and a national TV programme to teach you how to use it, all in 1981, then you probably lack substantial historical context.

Re: Cheaper to get an original Beeb

The low-end prices for a BBC Micro on eBay, based on recent completed sales, actually seems to be north of £200.

So you're right, but not by as much as someone might guess.

Re: Cheaper to get an original Beeb

I had an Electron; not only did one of our TVs cut off most of the top line, but *TV wasn't available.

When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

I only regret that I'll be too old to throw my hat into the 2050 bubble.

Microsoft veteran explains the one weird trick that made Windows 95 restart faster

I'd guess the potential blocker may have been device drivers, especially those written for MS-DOS; Windows 95 and 98 used to jump through some extraordinary hoops to try to retain compatibility with hardware that had shipped years ago with only DOS support, including routing device calls through the DOS filing system stack where necessary.

Claude is his copilot: Rust veteran designs new Rue programming language with help from AI bot

Re: I sort of expected something like this.

It'd be surprising if it didn't; e.g. ARC-enabled Objective-C* is smart enough to know when it needn't put things in the autorelease pool**.

* which is not garbage-collected but also definitely, definitely has nothing to say about static memory safety. So not otherwise like Java and definitely not like Rust, in case the mention of anything Apple-related brings the usual red mist amongst any readers.

** a dynamic, runtime-collected list of things that can be freed when the call stack next returns all the way up to the event loop. Objective-C is [almost-]everything-on-the-heap but uses the autorelease pool to allow for temporaries where another language might just use a stack-based object. But with ARC enabled, the compiler doesn't necessarily put things in the autorelease pool, it also sometimes just deallocates them when they've been fully used. But with no scope guarantees, sometimes leading to bugs by C++ developers who mistake ARC as a means of doing RAII for things like mutexes.

Trump says Nvidia can sell H200s to China – if Washington gets a 25 percent cut

About as well as Morocco's did, alas.

Re: What he really means...

If so then they'd better do it quickly; otherwise it'd be like trying to rename Crystal Palace or the Chicago Federal Building.

Classic MacOS for non-Apple PowerPC kit rediscovered

Re: CHRP alternatives were all better than Apple kit

I think possibly you're acting under a misapprehension; until a month ago no CHRP version of Mac OS has ever been seen in public. There were a negligible number of CHRP machines ever released, most of them ran AIX, some others ran Windows NT and none whatsoever ran Mac OS.

The licensed Mac clones were not CHRP machines. It seems that later Macintoshes were close, but they came after the shuttering of the clone programme.

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

Re: MZLA

I initially wondered the same until I found out that MZLA is a legal subsidiary of Mozilla that is responsible for Thunderbird. So it's a separate entity, to an extent.

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

Re: Fake it 'til... you get the idea

Agreed on the '80s not being a wasteland, even though they're before my time; this weekend I had a very strange experience though: I live in the US, and went to my local Waitrose-esque supermarket (it's a Whole Foods), where the in-store music for as long as I was there was: There is a Light That Never Goes Out, followed by Made of Stone.

I tried to spot a 50-ish-year-old Mancunian who might be in charge of the track list but none was obviously present.

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: Want

My thoughts on Facebook are neither original nor interesting, so I'll just note that it's a shame the Facebook group is private so that it can't easily be read, and that the old NVG list is no longer used.

Otherwise, my code could definitely be used for a full game, it just has restrictions due to its conceit, primarily: single-axis scrolling, and when scrolling that happens at a fixed speed. And obviously you could overload it with too many sprites, too much background detail, etc. I was imagining something in the Dizzy/Wonderboy III vein with collecting objects and/or player transformations acting to gate player progress, but — how original! — I'm very bad at finishing things.

Oh, and I've no idea what music would cost because I've never worked with audio. If it's just push a few registers every frame (and accept that music will be on the simpler side) then there's definitely room for that.

Re: Want

Yep. Links below. But I think I've figured it out: continuing to own and occasionally program for a SAM Coupé makes me feel like I'm somehow righting a 35-year-old injustice. Intellectually I know that this is silly, but it's also pleasant in a solve-a-puzzle sense. I am also aware that programming for the SAM Coupé is almost exactly as consequential as doing a crossword but I also often do a crossword.

Downloads are within its repository; video is here, albeit captured from SIM Coupé on a 60Hz screen so some smoothness is lost.

Re: Want

I'm on my lifetime third SAM; it's hard to qualify the attraction. I recently managed to get a full-screen 50Hz scroll with sprites working, for which I ripped off assets from the Master System... and then wondered whether perhaps I shouldn't just play a Master System game.

Answer: I shouldn't, it would remove the joy. Though I don't know why.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Apologies, the 'send corrections' button doesn't seem to be working...

> Although tiny, [Windows 95] was a masterwork, and it re-defined the computer user interface in a way that wouldn't happen again until the iPhone, 22 years later.

I'm not sure that 2007 minus 1995 is 22.

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

Re: Turns out...

All Bay City Rollers recordings are bad.

Re: Send it to Dave Plummer

Luckily the '80s bred a whole generation of computer scientists with experience of copying tapes. One question though: will we need somebody to hack out the Lenslok?

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Vision Pro yet

I just checked the website, and apparently it's still a product.

I think I'm very typical in iPhone terms: I picked mine based on screen diagonal. I don't have a clue what depth it is, and as long as it's within ordinary bounds I really don't care.

I had and very much liked a Retina MacBook back in its day but at that scale there was a substantial difference in heft. Even now between the Pro and the Air. I don't think the difference between an ordinary phone and the iPhone Air would even register.

Qualcomm solders Arduino to its edge AI ambitions, debuts Raspberry Pi rival

Re: How sad

There was an attempt to merge in 2018 but thanks for reminding us of how bad it could have been.

Qualcomm isn't Broadcom and it isn't Oracle. The only mild controversy I could find following a Qualcomm acquisition was the case with ARM as to whether acquiring Nuvia caused its ARM licences to transfer to Qualcomm. Not exactly the liquidate-all-value stuff of Broadcom.

Apple slips up on ChillyHell macOS malware, lets it past security . . . for 4 years

Re: unSigned

It's unclear who and what you think you're responding to with that comment. But if it helps for clarity: whether signing requires a developer ID or not is unlikely to be a factor in why people are reacting negatively to your posts, which was briefly where the conversational goalposts were a couple of posts ago.

Enjoy whatever tangent you're on now; good luck to anybody who responds and expects coherence.

Re: unSigned

I'm not a mindreader so I can but posit reasons you got downvoted. But, obviously, splitting hairs would be one of them. Do you agree with MachDiamond's assertion that "Lots of small developers have a hard time navigating Apple's red tape so it requires manually authorizing installs. " or not?

As a secondary guess at the reason, the text you quoted said (emphasis added):

> Beginning in macOS 10.15 [Catalina], all software built after June 1, 2019, and distributed with Developer ID must be notarized.

You said:

> If you don't [upload your bundle to Apple for notarization], you can't distribute it at all.

Those are not equivalent statements. Your claim may very well be true but it isn't supported by the quotation given.

Re: unSigned

> You've been required to upload your bundle to Apple for notarization for a very long time.

You seem to be challenging my assertion that signing for direct distribution involves no red tape. Can you explain what red tape you think exists?

A quick check of my GitHub history shows that I've signed my application for direct distribution something like 15 times in the last year and a half. There is no review process. Apple has not checked my application for content or purpose. There are no criteria that I have to meet.

The only obstacle is the developer fee. Which I'm not that bothered about. But here's a fun fact: preferences are not objective.

Re: unSigned

> Lots of small developers have a hard time navigating Apple's red tape

I don't think that's the issue; for the Mac signed apps are most-commonly signed locally and then distributed directly. The Mac App Store is the thing where you're navigating Apple's opaque acceptability criteria of the week, and that's not all that popular.

I think the issue is more the annual developer fee that is required to obtain a certificate from Apple.

Google is very sorry for pulling down COVID misinfo and pledges never to use outside fact-checkers

Re: xTube?

> Remind me who was saying in 2020 that they 'would never take the Trump vaccine'?

Nobody whatsoever.

Though in a world where the majority still think Trump actually said to inject bleach into your veins*, I can understand why you might think there's some nonsense about.

* he sort-of implied it, then clarified that it's definitely not what he meant when answering the immediate follow-up question.

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

When last I checked, video acceleration was also either nonfunctional or else severely limited. Which might affect your enjoyment of Nanosaur.

Oh, and if you're in the US and lazy, https://os9.shop will sell you a preconfigured OS 9-toting Mac Mini G4, with appropriate USB speakers if needed.

Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor

Re: I'm stunned

"Windows needs to send telemetry in order to improve future releases. Please find and plug in your modem cable, and ask your mother to get off the line for a few minutes."

Re: I'm stunned

The power of competition, I guess?

Windows 95 must have felt far from a sure-fire thing when development began: it provides a bridge towards a modern OS while retaining full backward compatibility — including support for devices with only DOS drivers — without incurring anything beyond a regular generational speed penalty, despite the underlying hardware being all over the map. And that's against IBM which already has a full modern OS on the market for the same hardware, without the legacy baggage.

Modern Windows development must feel like a walk in the park.

Apple's 'Awe Droppings' fall close to the tree

Speaking as a member of the habitually lazy, it's only faster to swap SIM cards if you already have an additional SIM card.

We landed in Buenos Aires mid-afternoon on a Saturday a few years ago, and missed the local phone shop by a few hours. It, and all the others, were additionally shut on Sunday. So no SIM cards until the Monday. Though they did at least work immediately, unlike the ones we bought on a different trip, to Milan; for whatever reason the network (probably Vodafone, but I could be misremembering that) took something like 10 hours to activate them.

I'm sure that organised people order these things in advance for delivery direct to their house but for people like me the availability of eSIMs is a boon.

Re: At 5.6 millimeters,

The iPhone 3G was 12.3mm. But I guess Apple has to keep up with the Joneses.

A repeated meme is that this is Apple's trial run for the two halves of a foldable it'll put out next year; if so then there's quite a lot of competition in the ~4.5mm range.

Microsoft open-sources the 6502 BASIC coded by Bill Gates himself

Re: Does it mention...

Oh that I had kept a link... to the 1m+-views video that casually asserts as an aside that Mario 64 was the first 3d video game.

Re: "Microsoft later, ahem, drew inspiration from CP/M"

*sigh* for the sad little anti-Microsoft troll, https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4037306/myth-windows-3-1-was-just-a-shell-on-top-of-dos is just one of many statements of reality available to anyone will the intellectual capacity honestly to enquire. Amongst other things:

> Win386 ran individual "V8086" processes -- which was a key feature of the Intel 386 processor running in Protected Mode -- in a completely preemptive multitasking way.

> This is key: All DOS applications ran as independent "V8086'' processes.

> Which means that, if you were running DOS software under Windows 3.1... every single DOS application was preemptively multitasked.

Re: "Microsoft later, ahem, drew inspiration from CP/M"

Windows 95 used concurrent multitasking for all win32 apps.

Windows 3.x used concurrent multitasking for DOS apps if you had a 386 or better.

You're thinking of native Windows applications; these were cooperatively multitasked prior to Windows 95.

But at least, unlike Mac OS, they were designed to be from day one. Prior to the MultiFinder Mac OS was explicitly single-tasking (desk accessories aside, which had specialised constraints).

Re: "Microsoft later, ahem, drew inspiration from CP/M"

You mean never rewrote any part of DOS from scratch? I disagree.

Microsoft rewrote the filing system interface and underlying implementation from scratch for DOS 2, modelling it on UNIX-style file streams in order opaquely to support directories, multiple users, network drives, and any other novel filing systems that might become relevant.

This replaced the file-control block interface of CP/M and DOS 1, in which the storage for any given file's state has to fit within a fixed-size blob owned by the calling application. This was a substantial internal change relative to the limited total amount of functionality that DOS implements; it's less true to call it just a filing system dressed up as an OS than it is with CP/M but, well...

There was also the abandoned multitasking DOS 4, a few years before Windows 3.x became the Microsoft thing that can multitask DOS applications. That made it out briefly, so the rewriting must have happened.

Re: claiming Bill Gates didn't write 'his' BASIC but stole it.

There are 1,000 things you could use to argue that the 68000 is the better processor, so for the sake of being devil's advocate I'll just point out:

* the 8086's asynchronous bus unit does a better job at prefetching than the 68000's microcoded slots; the 8086 therefore does a better job of bus saturation; and

* later, after the heyday of the ST and the Amiga and all the other 68000 excellence, the fact that x86 instructions have at most one indirect operand massively simplified the handling of exceptions. x86 instructions don't have to be restartable, they can all always just start again from the beginning if an exception was caught and handled the last time around. The 68ks jump through a lot more hoops here.

Though obviously the ARM2 is the really smart way to spend about the same transistor budget as the 8086, albeit with an additional seven years of microcomputer hindsight. Spend the transistors on registers, hence make indirect accesses few and far between, hence use page-mode accesses almost all the time.

Re: Does it mention...

In Apple v Franklin the court found that according to existing principles of copyright, it was infringement to copy ROMs if the code they contain amounts to the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself, in particular being interested in whether the code contained is the only way to achieve an idea or whether it's one that was selected from a range of possibilities.

So, sticking with an example machine already raised, the composite colour ROM in an Oric — essentially a PCM sampling of the composite pattern that should be produced based on the TTL RGB colour — probably isn't copyrighted under that test. But the BASIC ROM is (modulo that it might itself be an unlicensed copy of Microsoft BASIC, though I'm not sure whether that's apocryphal).

I'm honestly unclear on what basis you think that decision was flawed, or really anything other than inevitable. If you don't like the concept of copyright then fair enough, agree to disagree, but it's an odd case to focus your ire on.

If someone's motivation were more anti-Apple then they should probably even celebrate it: between that ruling and the complete lack of any meaningful order or separation of concerns in Wozniak's coding it more or less strangled the Apple II clone industry in its cot and thereby cemented the IBM PC as the thing that grew into a commodity. IBM's lawyers were just as keen as Apple's but the PC BIOS has a clean and well-documented interface as far as it goes.

Apple iOS 26 set to dump 75M iPhones on the e-waste pile

Re: utterly ludicrous clickbait.

Probably the worst case of all time was the original iPad; the iPad 2 doubled the RAM and added a second processor core, so not only did official iOS support end only about two years after the original had launched, you'd ideally probably have stopped updating at least a version before that as iOS 5 on it is a chore.

That said, Apple generally does excellently. My iPhone 6s remained perfectly usable for a solid eight years and its replacement iPhone 13 Mini is still going strong four years after the fact. Fifteen years on from that iPad experience, the general maturity of these devices is really obvious.

> Why would a software maker do that?

I have been resident in the US for years but am from the UK originally. I therefore have bank accounts in both countries, and am offered banking apps in both countries.

... except I'm not, because half the software makers tick the little box that limits their banking app to a single country, and Apple allows neither accounts that nominate multiple countries of residency nor multiple accounts to be active on a device at once. So — because banking apps like to impose their own staleness checks — I routinely have to log out of one account, sit through a lengthy process of ditching local copies of that set of iCloud content (photos and music, mainly), log into the other, update apps, then do the same in the other direction.

And, of course, it's not just banking apps. The application that is the only way to get alerts on my local public transit other than signing up to X, is also not permitted to be downloaded by anybody with any other country of residency nominated in their Apple account. That's just across the river from New York, where obviously nobody who isn't originally American lives.

So I'm off on a tangent here, but if we're asking "why would a software maker do that?" then I'd very much like to tag that on to the list. Were they worried that the people of Birmingham might be too interested in the daily train delays of New Jersey? Was there a massive influx of people downloading applications for foreign banks and wondering why they couldn't log in?

Junk is the new punk: Why we're falling back in love with retro tech

Re: Why ? Surely no one can't work it out ?

> Even CDs are "only" recorded with samples at around 30,000 per minute.

The CD sampling rate of 44.1 kHz implies more than 2.6 million samples per minute.

Still, cheer up. You were only off by two orders of magnitude.

Apple rushes out fix for active zero-day in iOS and macOS

> Making use of an out-of-bounds write doesn't sound especially sophisticated to me,

It's very rare that attacks rely upon only a single exploit. The out-of-bounds write may have been used by a sophisticated attack but that does not mean the sophisticated attack used only the out-of-bounds write.

Though with the lack of fuller disclosure by Apple, who knows?

Commodore Amiga turns 40, headlines UK exhibition

Re: Ah the good old Miggy ...

> Has the Achimedes managed to change CPU architectures

Yes — CPU architectures are different than they otherwise would have been because of the Archimedes.

Fungus-inspired Linux hack gives Amiga a Doom-only brain

Yeah. CIA A, Port A, bit 0; 1 to enable ROM overlay, 0 to disable it. After about 30 seconds of trying to look it up.