Posts by Nugry Horace

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

So... if you can guess what the trigger might be, you can try bits of it on the LLM and see if it reacts in an unexpected way. But otherwise, are you any better off than Pte Baldrick asking the LLM "Are you a German spy?"

'Ralph Wiggum' loop prompts Claude to vibe-clone commercial software for $10 an hour

"Huntley has documented how he used Ralph to create an a tax app for the ZX Spectrum, and later reverse-engineered and cloned an Atlassian product."

All of which appears to be paywalled, so I'm none the wiser.

Rebuilding VisiCorp's Visi On UI reveals how Apple defined the GUI era

I wonder if Visi On will ever become well-enough understood that support can be added for higher display resolutions (say the VGA 640x480 mode) or whether there are too many hardcoded assumptions that the whole world's a CGA.

Microsoft Task Manager now tasking PCs with running multiple copies of itself

Re: /forward /slash

CP/M utilities didn't use the slash -- STAT used $, PIP used [ . More likely to be inspired by TOPS-10.

Techie found an error message so rude the CEO of IBM apologized for it

Re: Triggering a Specific Error Message

Even if an error message can't happen, they sometimes do. The MULTICS error message in Latin ('Hodie natus est radici frater' - 'today unto the root [volume] is born a brother') was for a scenario which should have been impossible, but got triggered a couple of times by a hardware error.

Linux rolls out the welcome mat for Microsoft's Copilot key

One odd thing about this: Windows maps scancode 0x6E to F23, and so this patch is doing the same for Linux. But if you have a genuine IBM 122-key Host Connected keyboard, F23 only sends 0x6E if you've switched to the rarely-used scancode set 3. At power-up it sends 0x6A.

My best guess is that the Windows developer who originally mapped 0x6E to F23 was using a Key Tronic 122-key keyboard, which does send 0x6E in both modes.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: Really?

BASIC 2 for GEM was a development of Locomotive / Mallard BASIC, with labels instead of (or as well as) line numbers and all the GEM graphics API natively supported. Apparently Microsoft tried to get Locomotive to do a Windows port, but it never happened.

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

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

The PcW16 didn't have a discrete Z80 chip - the Z80 was incorporated in the gate array.

When old Microsoft codenames crop up in curious places

The acronym AIRO appears in the system software for the Amstrad PC1512. Apparently it stands for "Alan's IBM Rip-Off."

Part of "CHICAGO" also appears backwards in the "...IHC" signature that Windows 95 writes to floppy disks.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Given all the BBC micro references in this thread, I read "Asus Atom" as "Acorn Atom".

The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station

I remember one of my first train rides as a nipper, when they were still using a wooden fingerboard - not one of the nice painted ones you see on heritage railways, but one painted with blackboard paint and the destinations chalked on it.

Re: page 67 of Michael Portillo's book

The good thing about the 2-digit route numbers was they were allocated fairly logically, so you'd start to recognise that routes 4, 14, 24, 34 etc were all trains from Brighton to Victoria, with the higher numbers stopping at more places en route.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Always envious of my friends'

The PC200 was definitely a misstep by Amstrad -- they reused the chipset from the PPC portable, meaning they were targeting the home gaming market with a chipset designed to run Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3 on an LCD panel. I think a successful PC200 would have needed, at the very least, MCGA graphics (even if only the 320x200x256 mode) and a sound chip.

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: "Even less relevant was CP/M, which bloated the price for no useful gain. "

It's interesting that the C64 and the BBC both had Z80 accessories to run CP/M (in the case of the Beeb, multiple different ones, even). In the 1980s environment I can see where CP/M would be a useful feature for a Z80-based computer -- it meant access to a mature ecosystem of development tools like Microsoft M80, so would make it easier to develop for the platform, always a good thing. But that doesn't sound so persuasive if you're writing 6502 software.

(I was reading up on the C64 CP/M cartridge today. From the Z80 side it looks like living in a cramped flat where there are strange bumps under the carpet which you don't know what they are, but you know you mustn't trip over them.)

Re: Liam...You Forgot About......

There was obviously a niche in the market for a cheap wordprocessing / office computer because the PCW filled it very successfully for some years. Maybe if Amstrad hadn't had the PCW to hand, they could have packaged the QL in an all-in-one case with a proper keyboard and floppy drive, and sold it. It could even have shipped with CP/M -- CP/M-68K, of course. With a 68K architecture it might even have lasted a bit longer than the Z80-based PCW did.

The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver

Re: Not exactly a screensaver, but...

Don't know if this is the one you remember, but it's the one that went the rounds in our office: https://github.com/lwu309/Scmpoo

Council claims database pain forced it to drop apostrophes from street names

Re: Input validation

Or they're somehow online from an Amstrad PCW. Those had § right there on the keyboard between ; and #.

Re: Not even the worst crime against St. Mary

Maybe it was a ZX81 user. The ZX81 didn▝t have an apostrophe character, so people who needed one had to substitute the comma or an upper quadrant block graphic.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

Re: Remind me

It's perhaps indicative of my age that I'd imagine something from the "Spectrum garage" as being designed in anodised black plastic by Rick Dickinson, with stylish rainbow flash across one of the corners, all powered by a 12v Hoover motor.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: not just software

Ctrl-F for 'Forward' was done at the insistence of Bill Gates, because that was the keymapping in the (presumably non-CUA) mail program he used previously: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140715-00/?p=503

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

The built-in dishwasher in our kitchen has the 'finished' light on the inside, so you can't tell if it's safe to open it unless you've already opened it.

Manufacturers seem to think that sending a notification to the user over the Internet is a satisfactory substitute for, I dunno, putting a light somewhere where you can see it.

The New ROM Antics – building the ZX Spectrum 128

I've read elsewhere that the development environment was running in a Z80 emulator on the VAX rather than natively.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Re: My takeaway from this article...

I remember when my work laptop was running Windows 10 from a 128Gb SSD. The drive kept filling up, and in the end had to be upgraded. What concerned me was that I remembered running Windows NT 4 on a system with a 2Gb hard drive, and while Windows 10 is clearly an improvement, is it really such an improvement that it needs 64 times the space to run in?

Windows 11 puts 'disgusting' Remote Mailslots protocol out of its misery

Re: Net Send was disgusting.

Oh, it could push adverts - just not Microsoft's adverts. Back in the early 2000s when everyone used USB ADSL modems, you'd end up with Windows systems exposing their Messenger service over the Internet without any firewall, and so spammers started broadcasting NET SEND popups (some even containing pornographic ASCII art).

If your Start menu or apps are freezing up on Windows, Microsoft has a suggestion

Re: "Not even hijacked, just used"

I had to deal with a support call for an application I maintain, where it was apparently hanging when the user closed it. Cause: Some module loaded by the system-provided open file dialog trying to access a network resource and sitting there spinning. No change I could have made that would fix it, short of writing my own open file dialog instead of relying on the system one.

Tales from four decades in the Sinclair aftermarket: Parts, upgrades and party tricks

I remember seeing an editorial in Personal Computer World in around 1992 describing something similar to the Retro-Printer - a hardware device that interpreted a well-known set of printer codes and rendered them on a modern device. This was in the days when every DOS program needed its own printer driver.

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

Re: Origins

An external interface could replace the bottom 16k of ROM with RAM. But on a pre-128k Spectrum that would still leave the problem of the video RAM being fixed at 0x4000, which is a tad low for a CP/M system. (Not a problem on a 128, as you could put the video RAM at 0xC000 and page it out when not using it).

Re: Yeah, no

They seem to have had no objection to the Unofficial CP/M Website hosting MP/M-80, CP/M-86, CCP/M-86, MP/M-86 and PCP/M-86 (the last of which is DOS Plus without the DOS emulator and with a CP/M-like userland rather than a DOS-like one).

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

My favourite discussion of this type was on Raymond Chen's blog, where the comments section turned into a jokey arms race about how a program could ensure it was the one whose alerts ended up on top. From memory it ended something like "My program uses a robot arm to draw on the screen with permanent marker. It needs to do this to tell you that you could free up space by deleting temporary files." "Well, MY program uses the robot arm to stick a post-it note that covers the monitor entirely. It needs to do this to tell you that you have unused icons on your desktop."

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

https://xkcd.com/566/

I was expecting https://xkcd.com/2347/

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: Microsoft should move beyond NTFS

There's even one out there called Universal Disk Format (it's what DVDs use). I remember seeing recommendations to format your USB sticks as UDF to get around FAT limitations. Never caught on because operating system support for using UDF on anything other than a DVD suffered from all sorts of weird limitations.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Wafer-scale devices? That was going to be Sir Clive Sinclair's Next Big Thing in the 1980s. He'd even got Rick Dickinson to design a casing for his range of wafer-scale SSDs.

File Explorer fiasco: Window to Microsoft's mixed-up motivations

Re: Nitpicky, but...

And before Windows 3.x it was MS-DOS Executive.

Unable to write 'Amusing Weekly Column'. Abort, Retry, Fail?

Re: Why only an OK button on the popup?

I remember one joke application for the Mac where the buttons on the popup were "Bite me" and "Yo mama".

Re: Abort Retry Fail

The problem being that:

If Abort terminates the process, you drop back to COMMAND.COM, which may well try to access the same drive and trigger the same error.

If Fail doesn't terminate the process, the application may ignore the failure, keep trying to access the same drive, and trigger the same error.

The way to get out of the loop, as I recall, was to Abort (to get back to COMMAND.COM) and then Fail (because COMMAND.COM did check the result and handle a failed read). You'd end up at a "Current drive is no longer valid>" prompt.

Proprietary neural tech you had surgically implanted? Parts shortage

Re: "unnecessary computer sounds"

I remember when someone in our office discovered the Windows 95 'Robotz' theme. It sounded like the computer had a terrible case of indigestion.

Then a few years later we all became terribly familiar with the Windows XP setup music, because when it was being installed on a laptop the volume keys couldn't be used to mute it.

(Relevant Dilbert: https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-12-27 )

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

I still remember reading "So Beautiful, So Disturbing", a blog entry that imagined Vista as an unexpected new wife.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

At least it wasn't one of the big ones... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5acb313ded915d5a90e44be4/R052018_180320_Guildford.pdf

Microsoft gives Notepad a minimalist makeover to match Windows 11 style

Dark Mode? I'm holding out for the return of the Hot Dog Stand theme.

It's 2021 and someone's written a new Windows 3.x mouse driver. Why now?

And I see there's already a feature request for earlier Windowses back to 1.0...

Windows Subsystem for Android: What's the point?

Re: Minimum system requirements

"2 GB... is large enough to support even the largest desktop application. " -- Windows 95 Resource Kit

I no longer have a burning hatred for Jewish people, says Googler now suddenly no longer at Google

In the quoted memo, an organisation is "reporting into" an individual called Ben Jackson, who in turn is "reporting into" someone by the name of Pali Bhat. Hopefully not by pushing physical printouts down their throats.

I don't get the fashion for saying "Report into" rather than "Report to" - it's more verbose and the wording implies it's somehow a more... invasive process.

A beefy Linux 5.14-rc2 and light at the end of the tunnel for Paragon's NTFS driver

Re: I suppose it wouldn't be too much to ask to go the other way?

NTFS has had hardlinks since the beginning, and symlinks since Vista.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Re: In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, ...

One error message I've seen from C++ programs under Windows is "This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way".

It made me wonder "What, it asked the Runtime to have a bunch of topless women chase it off a cliff?"

I remember in the 1980s thinking it was a bad idea to tell people to 'hit' or 'strike' keys. Particularly if the software was running on a ZX81 or dead-flesh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H rubber-keyed Spectrum.

Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero

Guess what? If I want white text on black background, 16 point sans in one app, I want it in all.

A pity that modern versions of Windows have neutered the GetSysColor() API for no apparent reason.

This product is terrible. Can you deliver it in 20 years’ time when it becomes popular?

Modern? Freeman Wills Crofts did it in 1935.

NCSC's London HQ was chosen because GCHQ spies panicked at the prospect of grubby Shoreditch offices

Re: mandarin-friendly Victoria

There's another one where Humphrey suggests Hacker's political advisor should be found an office in Walthamstow: "It's a very nice part of Walthamstow." "And Walthamstow is a very nice place... so I gather."