Posts by David 132

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks

Hair? What's that?

It's the thing that, after a certain age, sprouts wildly from one's nostrils.

(Old git icon is a self-portrait.)

Re: Upvote for the mention of Blitz BASIC on the Spectrum

D'oh! You're absolutely right, and I clearly had a brainfart when I typed that. I meant Beta Basic of course.

In mitigation I can only offer that I was intrigued by Steelpillow's mention of the Blitz mode on SAM Basic and clearly that word was on my mind. I sort of wanted a SAM Coupe for a while, but by the time I'd saved up almost enough pennies for one, I'd discovered the existence of the Amiga and took a different track!

Upvote for the mention of Blitz BASIC on the Spectrum

BB was one of my first purchases* after I received my Spectrum+ in 84/85. It allowed flood-fill (well, slowly-rising-ooze fill, technically), true circles, 80-column text, and all sorts of other enhancements.

The manual, as I recall, was printed as an A5 booklet, in black ink on red paper to deter photocopying.

A pint for the BB author!

*my very first purchase was Elite, from a shop in London on a day-trip to the Big Smoke. I remember opening the box and admiring the LensLok on the train on the way back North. And then cursing that same LensLok when I couldn't get the darn thing to let me play the game :)

Re: GOTO

ZX81 BASIC even had FAST and SLOW commands. What other implementations allowed you to flip between "slug in oobleck" and "slug in treacle" speeds with a single command?

Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft

Is it hosted in the Nimbo-cumulus cloud?

Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Re: History....

To be fair, ST owners were degenerate subhumans deserving only of ceaseless scorn.

Signed,

A smug Amiga A500/1200/4000 owner.

Re: The Box Of Delights

Obligatory XKCD Penny Arcade...

Re: Glory Days

For a period of maybe a couple of months circa 1987 I lusted after the Archimedes A3000, until I saw an Amiga A500 running a demo in a store instead, which blew me away and set me on my Amiga path!

Re: Glory Days

I well remember the Acorn Teletext adapter; my school had one of them, in one of the primary school classrooms. I used it once or twice, what must have been 40 years ago now. As I recall it was the same size, and Acorn Beige colour, as the "Tube" second processor unit.

Aaaand that's just sent me down the Ebay rabbit-hole. Who knew that there's now such a thing as a USB-C PSU replacement for the BBC B??? I am impressed.

I'd love to know who downvoted your comment and their reason(s) for doing so!

Re: 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Also the very fine Spectrum Next that I have right in front of me on my desk here!

Z80 compatible, with a colossal 2MB of RAM, near-instantaneous SD card storage, and up to a 28MHz core clock speed. 10-year-old me would have been insufferably smug in front of the other kids at school :)

Re: The Box Of Delights

I have it on my NAS. If enough people here express an interest, maybe I can figure out a way to get it to them with plausible deniability.

Also the Bay that is skull-and-crossbonesy has it, or so I am told.

It's a cracker, especially the theme music.

Re: 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

And knowing Alan Sugar, that was probably because he got a job lot of Z80 processors cheap from a warehouse clearance and figured out a way to flog them. Putting "16" in the model name was totally not intended to deceive people into thinking it was a 16-bit machine :)

Lovely jubbly!

Re: 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers

Who else, when looking through the 1984 Argos catalogue linked from the article, found themselves saying "ooh! I remember my parents having that crockery set! and that's the portable TV I had in my bedroom to use with my computer!"

Just me?

Here's to nostalgia. Pint of real ale--->

Re: Glory Days

Indeed. Looking at the old circa-1987 ad that Dan 55 posted further up this page, I was struck by how high the prices seemed, even by 2024 standards. Allowing for inflation, they were almost stratospheric at the time.

My own parents bought me a Sinclair Spectrum+ for Christmas '84; my school had a room full of BBC Bs and a couple of Masters, and I wanted one of those, but their pricing was screw-you high for all but schools and the most affluent middle classes. IIRC, my Spectrum+ was £179, and a BBC B at the time was something like £399 (and £499? for a Master).

OpenAI plans to ring in the New Year with a for-profit push

Re: Hang on

It's the requirement for "supervision" and "careful checking of the output" that will doom LLM-based AI, or possibly the human race.

Consider the current state-of-the-art in "self driving cars".

They work very well... until suddenly they don't, and the meatbag behind the steering wheel gets an alert tone and has about 1 second (at most) to go from a state of distracted, book-reading, staring-vacantly-into-the-distance - to full comprehension of the situation and readiness to take corrective/evasive action. That's asking a lot of humans. I mean, I've been known to go in milliseconds from being asleep to being fully awake and vertical, but that's only when my subconscious brain hears my dog starting to retch & throw up in the corner of the room. Trust me, you don't sleep through that more than once :)

The output of LLMs runs up against the same limitation. They can be trusted X% of the time... until they can't. And the higher X goes, the more complacent we'll become, and the harder it'll bite us when they fall down and we don't spot it. "We can put AI in charge of medical diagnosis! We can put AI in charge of monitoring the skies for missile defence!" and so on.

Humans, in general, are fundamentally lazy. That's why we have spent so much of recorded history developing labour-saving devices, and it's why we're really, really bad at maintaining a state of constant alert and eagle-eyed supervision.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: They fucked up the web browser?

True story from my family lore - many, many years ago, my parents had moved into a new house. My grandmother (on my mum's side) came over to see the new place. She was a lovely lady, but somewhat prone to malapropisms. Walking into the front room, Grandmother looked around approvingly and said to my mum, "You know what this room needs? One of those dildos round the walls."

She meant, of course, "dado rails".

I don't think my mum ever stopped laughing about that one.

Parker Solar Probe sends a "Still Alive" tone back to Earth

Having seen Star Trek IV…

…and thereby knowing the result of a slingshot maneuver around the Sun, I am disappointed that the Parker probe’s “OK” signal wasn’t received back in 1986.

Microsoft adds another problem to the Windows 11 24H2 naughty list

Re: "layers and layers of security measures"...

And not the oinky end of the animal, either.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Re: infinite monkey nonsense

>Ook.

So true. So very true. The entire human condition, eloquently expressed.

*wipes eyes*

The icon is a pint of Winkles' Old Peculiar, Mage's Special. -->

Re: A quote

And his motto, according to the cover of his third album, "Duit On Mon Dei"

Truly exciting.

Millions of GPUs? Thousands of ExaFLOPS?

Wow. Just think of the possibilities.

Pictures of people with previously unimaginable numbers of arm joints and fingers.

Whole new areas of hallucinated alternative facts, confidently asserted in mere femtoseconds. Black will be white, up will be down, left will be right, P will be both NP and also Cents.

Videos with bizarre rendering and continuity errors, gurgitated on-demand and near instantly.

Truly, we are blessed.

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: Avoid 24H2 for now

You’re lucky there was at least an error code, and not just something dumbed-down and patronising like

“:-( Something Went Wrong.”

It’s a promising update

It should be pretty good when it gets out of pre-Alpha status.

…wait, it’s what??

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Remarkable front

We’re forever being told that these senior execs deserve their huge pay/bonus packages because “you have to pay this level to attract the best” or “they have huge levels of responsibility”.

Hmm. This is my sceptical expression.

Xfce 4.20 is out: Wayland support lands, but some pieces are still missing

Re: Still?

Do you uh, often read the Reg whilst using tweezers? Shouldn’t you be concentrating on the anaesthetised patient in front of you?

Re: Gradualist

Core Duo - ah yes, the processor Intel would rather we all forgot.

Core 2 Duo was where things started to get interesting after the nightmare that was the late-stage P4P microarchitecture ("150W heat dissipation for a desktop CPU? No problem! We'll just spec bigger heatsinks!"). I still fondly remember the rave reviews on Hexus.net and elsewhere when C2D/Conroe launched.

Re: Meh

Buried in an obscure folder deep in my NAS, not quite in the metaphorical locked filing cabinet behind a "beware of the leopard" sign, but close... I have a PDF copy of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines document from 1987. I refer to it quite often. It is surprising how much of it is still relevant - and depressing how little of it seems to still be in the industry's muscle-memory.

Re: Still?

>"Wayland people are engaged in re-inventing the wheel."

> The way POETTERING re-invented audio and init

AKA Poettering says, "the wheel is now triangular. But it WORKS FOR ME because my road surfaces are contoured perfectly to match and give a smooth ride with it. #WONTFIX. New in my Wheel v251.0: wheel now controls braking, signalling, and all fuel-delivery-related functions. Because I know better than anyone else."

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: computers on wheels

…and subscriptions for everything from GPS map data to Spotify to OnCall to heated seats.

Got to get that sweet, sweet recurring revenue, right?

Nvidia upgrades tiny Jetson Orin Nano dev kits for the holidays

Re: specs

Interesting. Works for me - I (in the US, FWIW) get links for purchasing it from Seeed, Arrow, and Sparkfun.

Here's the links in case you're still having issues.

Note that as I write this, all 3 distis report it as "out of stock".

Seeed: https://www.seeedstudio.com/NVIDIAr-Jetson-Orintm-Nano-Developer-Kit-p-5617.html?nvid=em-945-13766-0005-000

Sparkfun: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/22098?nvid=em-945-13766-0005-000

Arrow: https://www.arrow.com/en/products/945-13766-0000-000/nvidia?nvid=em-945-13766-0005-000

Aliens, spy balloons, or drones? SUV-sized mystery objects spotted in US skies

Re: If they have a couple of dozen Pandorica

Dunno about die, but I just drifted into a life-threatening coma after wading through BsW's dense, prejudiced, and near-AmFM1-level prose.

Re: Aliens...

"Give me an R.. give me an E... give me a Red Dwarf Garbage Pod???

This isn't an alien craft, it's one of our garbage pods with the writing burnt off! Holly, why didn't you tell Rimmer?"

"Well. It's a laugh, innit?"

Epic coughs up the dirty V-Bucks: Fortnite's 'dark pattern' refunds hit accounts

Re: “The average payment is said to be around $114”

Obligatory XKCD Penny Arcade...

Microsoft hijacks keyboard shortcut to bring Copilot to your attention

Re: I'm sorry, officer

And, inspired by iOS (because when it comes to really dumb user interfaces, I am very fair-minded and non-partisan)

- turning the wheel left slightly will activate the wipers, but only if you started the turn with your hands in the quarter-to-three position (using ten-to-two will result in bringing up Siri)

- turning the wheel left slightly more will sound the horn and/or apply the e-brake, depending on whether your radio is currently tuned to Spotify or FM.

- turning the wheel to the right will, for obvious and logical reasons, put the entire car interior into “personalization mode” where the windscreen blanks out and presents you with a choice of 5000 emojis and wallpapers. The only way to exit customization mode will be, after pressing everything and everywhere in increasing desperation, to turn the car off and on again.

Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas

Re: Keyboard layout

ã is particularly irritating

On Windows, of course, Numlock + Alt + 0227... 'ã'. I am enough of a saddo that I have several useful ASCII codes memorized for this method. Colleagues at work used to think I possessed powers of witchcraft, entering the occasional ­­® (017­4) or ™ (0153) with barely a pause in my typing rate!

The icon is a cerveja, just for you.

South Korean web giant Naver creates its own Linux distro

South Korean, you say?

So does that mean that for 2¾ hours every year, the /usr/president account gets full superuser level access over the entire OS?

Kyndryl's consulting business may be less than it seems

Re: Promising

Ha. Found the Kyndryl employee and - likely - downvoter on this page. It's OK. You don't have to be so defensive. You're among friends. If you're unable to speak freely, blink twice...

Hmm

“Many of these multi-year contracts cost more to service than they generate in revenue…”

“…but we’ll make it up in volume!”

Microsoft teases Copilot Vision, the AI sidekick that judges your tabs

And of those that will, one works for Microsoft on the Edge team anyway, and the other is severely concussed.

No, I can't help – you called the wrong helpdesk, in the wrong place, for the wrong platform

You’d be arrested for indecency with that rabbit, Warren.

Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor

Re: Diode polarity

When you were testing the TVs by watching Dr Who, did you get Maureen Lipman appearing on them all saying “Hungrrrrryyyy…. hungggrrrryyyy….”? :)

(This episode)

Elementary OS 8 'Circe' conjures Wayland magic

That photo of the login screen...

...I was looking at it and thinking, "huh, a small image superimposed over a scaled-up, blurred version of itself. Where have I seen that graphical technique used before?"

And then it came to me. Anyone else here remember Lotus Turbo Challenge II on the Amiga, and its loading screens for each track? :)

(https://youtu.be/oLQiwjGrEjE?t=187 if you have no idea what I'm talking about)

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Re: As noted

Seconded. Thunderbird was unusably slow on my PC (as in,even typing an e-mail address in the TO: field of a new mail would be p.. a... i...nfu... l... l... y laggy, like running Windows 95 on a system with 4MB of memory).

I first paused Defender, and then, encouraged at the result, excluded TB from its scans. Things are much better now.

Re: As noted

>My profile is ~ 16 GB, which makes moving it between machines an interesting affair.

The local floppy-disk shop must love you! :)

$373M ASML chipmaker shrinks to $228 – but it's made of Lego

Re: the name of an export restricted product

You've reminded me of the joke quoted in Chernobyl - presumably, based on a real Soviet joke of the period, but who knows.

"What's as big as a house, burns 20 litres of fuel every hour, puts out a sh*t-load of smoke and noise, and cuts an apple into 3 pieces?

...A Soviet machine made to cut apples into 4 pieces!"

(Icon - yes, that's my jacket, the one with "TULA" written on it in Cyrillic -->)

Win a slice of XP cheese if you tell us where Microsoft should put Copilot next

Re: Replace all "Help" Menu Entries in Windows 3.1

“a link to a community forum of non-experts discussing a different issue relating to a different version of a different piece of software”

Or the ever-helpful “Please run SFC.EXE /scan” regardless of what the problem is.

“Hi, my Windows 10 install keeps trying to upgrade me to Windows 11” -> “please run sfc…”

“How do I show non-printable characters in Word?” -> “please run sfc…”

Etc etc.

Re: Order Order!

Ah, so you’re a waffle man?

Re: The empire has no clothes

Could be even worse. Accrington Stanley.

Re: Pilot Lite

We had some brussels sprouts left over after Thanksgiving. I suggested to my wife that we should feed them to the elderly Labrador.

Wife was not amused, as the poor hound has emissions problems aplenty to begin with!