Posts by David 132 5506 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Along with a lot of other people outside the UK and EU I’m still waiting for my Spectrum Next from the Kickstarter campaign. The latest hurdle for the project team is UPS’s insistence that from a shipping point of view, there’s no difference between Li-Ion laptop batteries and the CR2032 coin-cells that the Next uses.
But when I do receive it I’m looking forward to rediscovering the joys of Speccy programming!
I'm also in Oregon near Portland. We got temperatures down to 12F (-11C) yesterday, which was particularly pleasant when our power went out at 8:30AM - and with it our water. The wife and I spent the day huddled round the log fire, with a propane heater and two electric ceramic heaters running off our generator - for all the good they did, I might as well have been waving a Swan Vestas match around. The house dropped to about 40F (4C) despite our best efforts (on a brighter note, I now know that I need to re-do the draught stripping around one of the doors - its hinges on the inside were coated in ice...)
Unlike Linus I didn't have to run a kernel merge window, although I did have to keep dozens of ducks and a couple of goats alive and thawed. No I won't swap with him :)
Fortunately our power came back on unexpectedly this afternoon (thanks heroic PGE linesmen!), but looking at the 'leccy company's outage tracker I see they still have 4100 outages and about 80,000 people affected - I do hope Linus isn't one of them. This weather is brutal.
...as is de rigeur for concept vehicles. I'm sure the production models, if they ever appear, will look just as sleek and futuristic and clean, right?
(And for those who think I'm being needlessly cynical, I present Exhibit A: Harris Mann's original design sketch for the Austin Allegro.)
I’ve just read the article and evidently it’s now been fixed.
By the way, from personal experience I can tell you that the Reg team prefer corrections to be sent via the link (at the top of each comments page) - and they’ve been known to get mildly acerbic if this process isn’t followed.
> True. There's been a lot of talk this morning about the possibility that real fraudsters will get away with it.
The watchword in British justice used to be, “better that ten guilty men go free, than one innocent man is hanged”.
Apparently, like so many other things, that’s just a comforting lie we tell ourselves these days.
I rather liked today’s Matt cartoon in the Telegraph…
(Apologies if paywalled.)
> I'm sure I made some typos but I cant find them....
“Boing”, while pleasingly onomatopoeic of things bouncing off the ground, is not the company’s name :)
Oh and just to be an irritating over-pedantic wiener, I’ll also point out “cant” :)
Upvoted you anyway for a cogent and informative comment.
Am in Oregon (in January). Can confirm.
When my house was built, people said the guy was daft to build it here, it'd sink. But he built it anyway. It sank. He built a second one. That sank.
He built a third one. That caught fire, burned down, and sank. So he built a fourth one.
That one stayed up, and I'm living in it.
Part of the Amiga quirkiness. Early models had various B52s song titles etched onto the motherboards - Rock Lobster and so on - because the designers were fans of that band.
The Guru Meditation was essentially the equivalent of a Windows BSOD - once you saw it, that was it, game over, nothing you could do other than reboot - but yes, it was arguably more stylish.
And due to the lack of hardware memory protection on the Amiga, you'd see the Guru quite frequently.
Later versions of the Kickstart ROM introduced the yellow Guru Meditation, which in theory was recoverable, but in my experience - nah. Just a different tint to accompany your reboot :)
ISTR that in Windows 3.x, if you clicked repeatedly on the Windows Flag logo in the About box, it would eventually switch to a bitmap picture of Bill Gates instead and a scrolling list of the developers.
And let's not forget the Wolfenstein-alike hidden in Excel 95, or the entire flight-sim that came with Excel '97. That latter was pretty much the straw that broke the camel's back, and caused - given that the business world at the time was waking up to code security issues in general - the total clampdown on Easter Eggs at Microsoft and beyond.
> Gigabyte drives didn't exist yet.
Indeed. I remember when in the 2nd year of University, a friend got a 1GB 3.5" IDE drive for his PC - this would have been around '94.
We were all incredibly impressed at how humungous it was and, of course as is the Sacred Tradition, doubtful about how he'd ever fill it. To quote Blackadder, "More capacious than an elephant's scrotum".
I had a 60MB-ish drive in my Amiga A1200 at the time and thought THAT was pretty huge.
Ah, yes. Back in my day working at $LargeTechCorporation, we were frequently called on to do demos of our latest & greatest at CES, Microsoft TechEd and similar all-comers trade shows.
The marketing people could never understand why I always put my foot down with a firm hand :) and insisted on cabled Ethernet for demos wherever possible.
"But the cables look so ugly! With WiFi $latestversion we can get just as much performance and it'll support our work-anywhere, truly-mobile marketing message!"
Yes, Chuckles. And Wifi worked perfectly in the lab.
But in the Moscone Center, or Olympia/ExCel, with hundreds of other companies' demo networks, and (tens of) thousands of attendees' devices... it would always crash and burn. How's your 4K video streaming demo NOW, Mr Marketing Know-it-All?
But did you also spot the blooper in the article, which erroneously describes the Amiga 2000 as having a 68020?
Probably the author meant A1200. The B2000 had, as standard, the same 68000 as the 1500, 500 and 1000 before it, thanks to Commodore’s glacial pace of hardware development.
Sorry to be boringly pedantic and technically accurate (the best kind of accurate, obv.) but that one's been debunked by the Mythbusters. Quoting from the MB Wiki: "Even modifying a rifle to shoot a penny at supersonic speeds failed to cause a penetration."
This reality sucks.
>XP did not "helpfully" turn options back on "for a better user experience".
Oh god, triggered I am.
"You can turn Windows Defender off, but we'll turn it back on again later for your protection"
How about "no, f*ck off, if I turn my AV off that is my decision and my risk and I don't need to be patronized or hand-held"...
Per the icon, I am currently sitting here with a pint of Crux Fermentation's finest Porter, so my comments might be less coherent than usual (hush at the back there, what do you mean "than usual"??)
"It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
'We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!' "
If you’ve figured out a way to remove the annoying “Microsoft Points” and “Use a Microsoft Account” nags from the main Settings window on 10/11, do let me know. There used to be a method using Vivetool but Microsoft conveniently “broke” that a couple of years ago, quite by accident of course.
…no-one, absolutely no-one, could have foreseen that a mechanism for allowing arbitrary web pages to silently and automatically install applications on user PCs might be abused. That would call into question the integrity of the world’s CAs, and if you can’t trust CAs, who can you trust?
Oh, sorry, forgot my <sarcasm> tags there.
"...and from here in the commentary box I see that the dinosaur has bowled a maiden over, and also eaten several others too. Can you recall a similar thing happening previously, Blowers?"
"Well, yes, Aggers, I well remember the first game of the '81 Test, where a Chesterfield sofa carrying two men appeared suddenly on the infield and the ground was invaded by those cricket-bat wielding robots, but of course that was overshadowed by the quite magnificent performance by the Windies later that same match..."
You have to realize how marketing executives think.
“Here is a good thing that people like. It makes money. It will make more money if we add adverts to it. Therefore we will add adverts.”
It’s literally on that level. Screw what the viewers want, there’s revenue targets to meet!
That spokesman's comment that you quote: "We do not publicly disclose our prosecution policy in relation to specific offences as to do so may allow offenders to adapt or restrict their behaviour to conduct which falls short of our prosecution threshold."
...has just made me irrationally angry (and yes I know, I'm 13 years late).
Isn't it tantamount to saying "we won't say what constitutes an offence, because then people will stop doing the illegal stuff to avoid prosecution"?
And in a sane world (yeah, yeah) isn't that the primary objective of a new law - to stop the "bad" behaviour? Presumably the spokesman only considers it a successful law if it results in lots of prosecutions?
Bah.
