Posts by David 132

ZX Spectrum, the 8-bit home computer that turned Europe on to PCs, is 40

Re: Yeah

I have a Spectrum Next coming to me, in theory, as I backed the Rev.2 kickstarter campaign. Delivery was supposed to be last August, but between Covid, chip shortages, lockdowns in Shanghai, supply chain chaos and now Putler's misadventures in Ukraine, it's looking like we'll be lucky to get them before the end of this year. Even the FPGAs are in short supply; the Next team have just had to redesign the motherboard for a different model of FPGA, commit to a no-refunds-no-cancellations contract for supply of them (estimated lead time 53 weeks!) and pay scalpers extortionate amounts of money just to get a handful of the parts to build validation units.

Sir Clive had it easy by comparison!

Following up... OK, I was puzzled about this, so did some checking using WinUAE on my PC here.

Workbench 1.3 (build 34.20) came with Basic and the aforementioned demo on the Extras disk.

Workbench 1.3.3 (b 34.34) didn't. Perhaps this latter is what shipped with the A1500.

> 1.3 ditched AmigaBasic

Really? Perhaps on the A1500, but I definitely remember my A500 coming with AmigaBasic on the 1.3 Extras disk. There was a lovely sound/graphics demo that played Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring in polyphonic sound while drawing lines on the screen. After having grown accustomed to the limitations of my Spectrum for the preceding 5 years, that was a major future-shock moment for me!

I am skill

I am skill

I am skill

I am skill

scroll?

D BREAK - CONT repeats, 10:1

Kraft Heinz signs up Microsoft to lift it into the cloud

Re: CIO

And I'm sure Microsoft are keen as mustard to get started, and indeed relish the opportunity.

One can only hope that they'll be using HP kit.

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

Re: WinHelp

> Current Microsoft "help" seems to be to launch a browser

..any browser you want, as long as it's Edge...

> with a search query.

...to any search engine you want, as long as it's Bing.

Grrrr.

Re: That NAS under the stairs

Ah, the NASk of Amontillado?

Under pressure, SAP shuts down Russian operations

Re: Moral Compass

And if your moral compass is giving you introspection and second thoughts, well that counts as Virtualization, so that'll be a whole different licencing £££ scale...

IoT biz Insteon goes silent, smart home gear plays dumb

Re: I drove by the Edsel dealer today….

> …not a sole about.

Left you floundering, huh? Perch here and we’ll see if we can fix your high bream headlights.

Who indeed? Obviously not the alleged former executives, who have never heard of the name "Insteon", were never in that area, "sorry you must have me confused with my identical twin cousin from Guatemala", no hablo ingles, and for whom any mention of Insteon on their social media profile is obviously a dastardly Russian Iranian North Korean hacking plot?

Immersion-cooled colo is coming to Ohio... via a crypto-mining datacenter

Re: Minimal impact my arse

>But there are benefits also: It increases aquatic plant and fish populations, which also draws more tourism via recreational fishing, which Monticello businesses don't mind.

And the biggest benefit of all - it allows manchildren with more money than brains to trade imaginary links to pictures of cartoon apes back-and-forth with each other! What higher purpose could anything have, you cynic?

Logitech Lift: Vertical mouse for those with small hands

Re: Your sinister bias is showing

Meeses. No less an authority than The Muppet Christmas Carol taught me that.

Semiconductor average lead time breaks half-year barrier

Re: Project Manglement

This definitely looks like a job for Dido Harding.

Oh sorry, did I say “for”? I meant “by”.

BOFH: The evil guide to upgrading switches

Re: I loved total control

>Summary: Eliminate the idiotic bureaucratic "solution" by adhering to it as strictly as possible

AKA "malicious compliance".

Re: rule 1

Let me guess, you saved the "Windows 11" sticker for something white and porcelain in the restroom?

You can buy a company. You can buy a product. Common sense? Trickier

Re: 'twas ever thus

To quote an old SMBC comic:

"What's the difference between eugenics and a charity marathon?

Well, one's a race for the cure..."

Re: 'twas ever thus

I was about to say, "if we turned it off the cat might escape from inside!"

Re: 'twas ever thus

I had to rewind through many, many comments, but I think you're referring to the cat I alluded to?

She's fine. Lurks around the barns and keeps the meece under control. And also produces on a regular basis Kitty-Roca(TM), my Labrador's favourite squishy treat, but let's not go there.

Re: 'twas ever thus

> When the time comes to move the washing machine to your next abode, you will need them.

Interesting difference between the UK - where I was raised - and the US, where I now live...

In the former, you typically take all appliances with you when you move house. In fact, I distinctly remember that when I bought my first house, the parsimonious sellers had taken not only the washing machine and fridge, but even the bathroom toothbrush shelf and loo-roll holder. Oh, and every ceiling light fitting. (Hey, at least they'd left me the bulbs. A friend bought a house and the sellers had even taken the bulbs and bayonet holders, then so that there weren't "dangerous loose wires", had thoughtfully twisted the two wires together in every room and taped them. You can imagine how that went when he took possession on a dark winter afternoon and tried to turn a light on...)

In the US, at least in my experience, you leave everything like that. Unless you specifically exclude them from the sale, the expectation is that the washer, dryer, fridge, oven etc will all stay with the house. In my case I also acquired two trailers, a ride-on lawnmower and a cat, but that's another story...

Re: 'twas ever thus

I once had a colleague bring me his new PC to fix. He'd carefully built it himself - new minitower case, motherboard, everything - but it just didn't work.

I figured it out in the time it took me to put the PC on my desk and rotate it so I could see the back.

Long story short, he'd screwed the motherboard directly to the backplate of the chassis, scorning those little brass standoff pegs and thus shorting the motherboard to the chassis in a thousand places. The fact that the ATX I/O shield couldn't be fitted because it didn't now line up with the aperture on the chassis, he considered merely as an indicator of how shoddily the chassis must have been made.

So I re-assembled it with an appropriate quantity of standoff pegs and perfectly-fitting I/O shield, and amazingly it worked. That motherboard must have been pretty idiot-proof.

The icing on the cake was that the colleague in question worked for our IT department, and therefore should have had more technical knowledge than, say, a marketing droid...

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Re: Money can't buy maturity

It was a Molesworth reference, but I doubt that name means anything to many of the readers here these days!

Re: Money can't buy maturity

> Me, I never learned Latin. I know 'caveat emptor' means buyer beware, but what is the equivalent for beware of the buyer?

That would be "cave emptor", I believe - Latin being very, very beholden to the endings of words (as any fule kno).

I am now having flashbacks to my year of Latin and Greek lessons aged 11. Eeek.

Huawei reportedly furloughs Russian staff and stops taking orders

Specifically, an oxymoron is "a contradiction in terms" - think "Military Intelligence" or "Safe Danger" as examples.

A tautology is a statement or expression that confirms itself, as best illustrated (in both senses of the word) by XKCD: "The first rule of Tautology Club is... the first rule of Tautology Club."

Creator of SSLPing, a free service to check SSL certs, downs tools

XKCD

As ever, there is an XKCD comic for this very occasion. Frankly at this point it would be more noteworthy if there wasn't.

Backup frustration brought this CTO to forefront of ransomware protection

Ah! A person after my own heart!

Yes, my first thought on reading “…a constantly-versioning file system…” was “oh, just like VMS then” with its automatic

THESIS.DOC;1

THESIS.DOC;2

…etc.

Have a pint of mild and let’s not be bitter.

Why is IBM selling post-quantum crypto when it's still a pre-quantum company?

Re: Meh.

"Quantum" in the sense of "a discrete quantity"?

Re: "Have you seen the forms?"

I think @stiine means the formatting error in the last paragraph of the linked IBM "pricing-but-not-pricing" form.

How dare you suggest that there might be an error in anything produced by the fine editorial team at El Reg?

EU countries want to pool photos in massive facial recog database

Re: Defeat Strategies......

...or we just carry one of these portable invisibility shields around with us all the time.

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Ah, I see you're an average programmer.

(Or perhaps that was just mean.)

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Re: GPGs

Last time I bought a new toilet (remodeling a bathroom… it’s not like I buy them on a daily basis) its flush power was illustrated, somewhat bizarrely, with a picture of 10 pool/snooker balls being flushed.

As I said to my wife… if you stand up and look down at the toilet bowl and see that you’ve just passed a load of pool balls, you probably need to see a specialist…

Re: Time sink

Different Pinball game - I think - but it's now possible to play Windows XP's 3D Pinball Space Cadet under Windows 10 or 11.

Me, I'm losing far too much time lately to Pinball Dreams on my Amiberry Amiga emulator!

In my experience, just about every witty or meaningful quote ever is automatically attributed to either Winston Churchill or Mark Twain.

"640KB should be enough for anybody" - Mark Twain

Re: Well, at least they disappeared in later versions!

How about replacing the BSOD with a looping animation of Futurama's Hypnotoad?

(Note for ShadowSystems and any other users with screen reader software - that link is just to a 10 hour cut of Hypnotoad in all his glory; if you already know who the character is, you're not missing anything if you don't click it)

Microsoft dogs Strontium domains to stop attacks on Ukraine

Squaxx dek Thargo, indeed.

Re: Cool, but why are Microsoft doing this?

I actually emailed the article author just after publication, asking this exact question. I'm not sure how I feel about a private company like Microsoft being able to seize domains - even if, in this case, it's for a good cause. Some context would be really helpful.

Finnish govt websites knocked down as Ukraine President addresses MPs

One has to hope that the Russian kleptocracy puts aside just enough of the Russian oil to immolate Putin in the grounds of the ReichstagKremlin.

Rivals aren't convinced by Microsoft's one-click default browser change

Re: Infuriating

While I get the point that people should keep software patched and up to date... this increasing insistence by OS and application vendors that we should drop everything and interrupt our workflow NOW to install their patches is driving me insane.

Yes, patching is becoming easier and more frictionless. But it still requires, at minimum, closing and reopening the browser or other application, and all too often, a full reboot (Microsoft, looking at YOU).

And I venture to suggest that the mere fact that patching is now "so easy for the end user" is itself encouraging developers to be slipshod and lazy. The prevailing attitude now seems to be "well, it doesn't matter if we screw up, we'll just push a patch out and block anyone who's using the old version from connecting to our service...". Few things are more infuriating than opening Firefox, or booting up Windows, or switching on a games console, in a hurry to get something done, only to be confronted with a faux-cheery "please wait while we install updates! this shouldn't take more than twenty minutes or so! have a nice day :) !"

Is that better, or worse, than the old days, when it was a case of "have to get this right, because if we screw up then we'll end up having to recall and reflash ROMs / mail a bajillion floppy disks out to our customers"?

French court pulls SpaceX's Starlink license

As ever, there is an XKCDSMBC comic for just this occasion.

Re: Tesla

Panel gaps and build quality are probably better on the vintage car, even something from British Leyland circa 1973, but that's a whole 'nother flamefest...

Re: Tesla

To be fair to the French (and I say this as a Brit, so you can envisage the gritted teeth), a nation that came up with the Citroen DS (La Déesse) plainly knows a thing or two about making cars, and should be credited accordingly. A vintage DS, or a modern Tesla? No contest, pass the mineral-oil suspension fluid...

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Hey, my sense of humour was formed decades ago, and dad jokes are all I got now.

I'm an incorrigible punster. So don't incorrige me.

(On a serious note, one of the wonderful things about having moved to the USA a few years ago is that very, very few of our Beano level schoolboy jokes have made it to this side of the pond. So I can regale friends and family here with the stalest of knock-knock jokes etc., and they react like I'm the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde...)

Re: Not quite...

And when I hear Jodrell Bank, my first thought is of Tom Baker plummeting from it and morphing into Peter Davison. I am old and sad.

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

My neighbor is a really good farmer - he’s out-standing in his field.

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

Who are you, who are so wise in the ways of science?

Re: Not quite...

Ah, early 90s humour.

"What do you call the small box on the back of a Sky satellite dish?"

"A council house."

AMD: Pensando gives us better-than-AWS networking tech to rule the cloud

Not surprising.

They're hardly likely to say "we bought this company and it turns out their products are actually not as good as we thought".

I mean, they're not HP...

First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets

Re: Where can I get me one...

Here in the States, we can buy them at any supermarket.

There is a 5-minute legally-mandated waiting period, alas.

OpenAI test drives caption-to-image-generating DALL·E 2

Ted: Uh, Dougal, that wasn't a banana...

China rolls out bots to enforce ‘temporary closed-off management’ of Shanghai

Re: You have a choice

Ah, the ED-209 was never that coherent or polite.

It would be more like "Return to your dwelling. You have 30 seconds to comply. You have 29 seconds to comply. You have 28 seconds..."

What I found depressing about the lockdowns in the UK - from my vantage point over on the other side of the pond - was how it seemed to turn everyone into petty little Stasi.

I have a good friend in the UK - very clever, extremely successful, and he's pretty well known in the tech industry. He's a nice guy. And yet he proudly contacted me back in around May 2020 (or whenever it was.. just after the lockdown started...) and boasted of how he'd seen several of his neighbours congregating outside on the pavement to share cigarettes and get some fresh air, so he'd dobbed them in to the police. Sent me gleeful video footage from his phone shot through his window of the constabulary turning up to "have a word with" the offenders.

Jesus wept, what is it with some people?