Posts by that one in the corner

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Commodore 128 - A Questionable Example

That is true.

But you had to decide to take the plunge at the initial purchase, and there wasn't much C128-specific s/w available, so you - unless there was already something you wanted to run - it was a leap of faith that the programs would appear. There was a bit of a self-reinforcing loop between buyers and authors, neither wanting to take a gamble on the other.

As opposed to starting with just the MDA board in a PC, knowing that you could upgrade as/when the EGA software arrived: you're not having to take any leap on day one, if you don't wish to.

Re: Commodore 128 - A Questionable Example

Except that your customer can buy an EGA card without having to buy an entirely new PC (unlike buying a C128 and still having the C64 in good working order).

Oh, and having an MDA (or, better, a Hercules card) AND your shiny new EGA card plugged in together meant you could now run two monitors on one machine (not quite as seamlessly as with today's GUIndesktops).

The two situations - buying a C128 or an EGA card - were nothing alike, so the questions of writing s/w for one or the other (in terms lof whether there could be a market for that s/w) wasn't alike either. Even before you raise the question of what types of use each machine was going to get (business or pleasure) and what that did to how much you could charge for the (possible) versions of the s/w. And so on and so forth.

No joke: Microsoft foolishly published inaccurate price list on April 1st

Re: "It’s the New Commerce Experience"

The only time it is valid to describe anything a company provides as "an experience" is when they have opened the doors to a theme park.

"Experience the thrill of anticipation as our payments page stalls: will your bank balance plummet as you realise just how high our charges really are or will your neck be broken by the g-forces as we spin you around, back into the maw of our 'optional add-ons' pages? Be prepared for laughs at 'customers also bought' and shocks as 'buy now, one-click' buttons suddenly appear under the mouse pointer! End with the heart-pounding, blood-pumping moment as you punch the monitor the fifth time you see 'you one-time code has expired, try again?'."

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: US produce?

Crikey!

Re: US produce?

> Thank, kind sir.

Proofreado! I'll swear that the "you" was there last time I looked. Maybe if I shake this tablet *really* hard it'll drop out onto the duvet....

Nope. But apparently I have just finished level four of something called "Flappy Birds"?

Re: Tuition

> German polka history nor left handed puppetry

Could we trouble you to give citations that these are real degree courses (offered at Bachelor or taught Masters level), offered as an accredited course at a UK University?

If not, one might have to conclude that you making things up purely to rail at them.

Re: US produce?

Thank, kind sir.

Re: Please explain

>> In the US it would be illegal to sell these cars. The crash-test rating isn't high enough

> I thought it was the other way around and the EU/UK standards are higher...we already know that the cybertruck is illegal on UK roads as a rather crude example.

The US crash test rating is all about protecting the car's occupants, as is the toughened[1] windscreen & windows, the supposed bulletproof construction etc.

The UK and EU regs Cybertruck falls foul of are aimed at protecting pedestrians and other road users - e.g. the too-sharp edges. Plus issues with the steer by wire, which isn't inherently self-centring, some other bits about difficulty of getting it certified.

These are two distinctly different attitudes and the clash can cause difficulties in both directions.

I haven't found (yet) anything definitive with regards to the crash testing[2], except for responses saying things like "US cars are getting heavier to survive the cras tests" which seems to indicate similar differences in attitude: the US wants to drive their car away after a crash, the EU/UK wants as many people involved in the crash, inside and out, to survive. One set of cars gets rigid & heavy, the other lighter and deliberately crumpleable.

[1] albeit not as tough as boasted

[2] as always, solid citations for or against this current understanding are welcomed

Re: Please explain

> Parental leave should be part of the wage package

Well, definitely the salary package - benefits help to the low waged is sensible.

Re: US produce?

I always favoured the broadsheet reporting: The Eagle was most reliable on the issues concerning relations with the Treen, which I feel have a lot to inform us with respect to today's situation.

Ok, so The Mekon is green[1], whilst The Donald is orange, but once you look past the Chromatic Question...

[1] and we all know that it isn't easy being green, so we should cut The Mekon some slack on that account

Re: Trump is easy to model

> the 'golden age' of manufacturing that lives in his head is never coming back.

But, but, people are saying, many people, that Trump has the best expert in his buddy Elon:

>> "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth."[1]

How could that Dynamic Duo ever get it wrong?

[1] Maybe the World has just moved on, it has been a couple of years since he made that claim.

From the "fact sheet", singling out Blighty

> The UK maintains non-science-based standards that severely restrict U.S. exports of safe, high-quality beef and poultry products.

Not in the least; if we were actually offered high-quality beef (without excessive levels of hormones) or poultry products that were properly prepared (instead of damaging eggs so that they go off if you don't keep them refrigerated) then we would happily accept them.

But it looks like the USA really wants to keep all its safe, high-quality products to itself, and just offer the rest of the World its dregs. No thanks.

(Similarly, why would Argentina take in US beef? There is a reason the US imports tasty cows from the Argentine...)

(And the tirade against Japan, which boils down to US car makers can't be fagged to meet their higher standards...)

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: In other news

> Is this actually worthy of an article.

Yes.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but (alongside all the fun with biting the hand etc) The Register does actually report on things that will impact those working in the tech industries. Like prices going up.

They also report on prices going down, parts running low, parts in a glut, new things coming, old things going.

Doesn't matter if you think any particular reason for those changes is too trivial to report on - because, hey, maybe there is something else going on as well - a bit of price gouging whilst they have something else to blame?.

Perhaps even a miracle may happen and next week we can refer back to this article when it turns out that industry didn't panic like sheep seeing the shadow of a wolf, but they kept calm, used their current stocks and held out for the whole 6 days until DT changed his mind again[1]. Hard to refer back if the article wasn't written in the first place.

[1] wow, beginning to think that fruit juice at lunch packed more of a punch than I realised! Totally drifted off into fantasy land.

Isar’s first orbital rocket crashes into sea – CEO calls it a 'great success'

Re: Spectrum rocket destroyed

He isn't allowed to operate in Norway, the authorities keep refusing his paperwork: there are just too many strings attached.

LLM providers on the cusp of an 'extinction' phase as capex realities bite

Cloud was more transformational

Because all it did was rename a way of working that we'd long since demonstrated works (buying time on a sever), sprayed on go-faster stripes and upsold it like profits were going out of fashion.

The LLMs: not following any proven path, in fact selling THE Neural Net application that we hadn't demonstrated is actually useful or could be put into service with understood cost/benefits for both true & false responses.

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

Maybe that is part of the trick to getting malware onto people's systems.

Either make it tiny, so nobody notices it slipping down the wire, or so big that you get a dialogue box saying "3 minutes, 2 minutes, 17 minutes..." and then users just take it in their stride "bloody thing is doing ANOTHER update!" and go get another coffee.

Re: Malware in Lisp

> Naming it CAR & CDR instead of FIRST & REST was the true malware move

Aside from being sarky about whether or not you know where the names CAR and CDR came from, it is more important - if anyone wants to use Lisp - to realise that calling them FIRST and REST would only make sense in one - albeit common - use of the Cons Cell. The two halves of the cell are equally capable of holding the same kinds of data and, if it makes sense to your algorithms, you can quite happily always have a pointer in the CAR and an atom in the CDR.

More - sensibly? - you'll use the cell to hold a binary tree - in which case, let's moan that the accesors aren't called LEFT and RIGHT or BEFORE and AFTER. Of course, if it makes your code more readable, you can always just define functions with those names...

But I was very serious about the happy fact that CAR and CDR allow for simple compound accessors just by adding in a few more As and Ds, which "alternative" names really don't - as the Common Lisp docs show :-)

Re: Malware in Lisp

Bah.

> Don't you know where your Address and Decrement Registers are

Where the Address and Decrement parts of your Registers are

Don't let the tablet's orteaukorekt delete lumps of sentence when you miss the space button andrunallthewordstogether.

Re: Malware in Lisp

Why? Don't you know where your Address and Decrement Registers are?

And what do you end up using instead of CADR? FIRST_OF_THE_REST is readable but a pain to type! Which only leaves us needing "better" names for CDDR, CAAADR etc etc (you soon get used to using those to pick your way through flattened graphs, k-way trees and other fun data structures).

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

> Lisp I believe was used for ML or perhaps expert systems

Lisp has been used for pretty much everything interesting, including every aspect of AI research planning, natural language (not LLMs but directed syntax & semantics), theorem provers, theorem generators, logic programming, novel search and pattern recognition, fuzzy systems, weighted reasoning (leading to, yes, Expert Systems). In all of these areas more specialised languages have been created (e.g. Prolog, Loglang ... for logic programming) but Lisp-based tends to be a good starting point and for experimentation with modifying mechanisms before speeding things up with, e.g. a Prolog core written in Pascal or C.

Lisp is also good for "practical"(!) uses, like writing compilers, symbolic mathematics, text processing - yes, alternatives exist (compiler-compilers and lexical analyser generators abound, coded in your bog-standard languages like C/C++/Java (oh, why did Antlr go down that route, sob?) but if you have The Next Big Grammar Idea give Lisp a go for all the early trials before turning it into something faster, "more palatable" for the masses: your AST editing is probably going to involve lots of list transforms (see below re "every sufficiently large...").

> FORTH isn’t used much any more, if at all, though Lisp variants still exist and can be used in AI research.

Lisp is still definitely alive - it is still the core of Emacs, "modern" variants like Scheme or Guile are available and used inside applications. And, of course, "every sufficiently large C program will re-implement Lisp, badly".

Forth is still used as well. The issue with saying things like "language X is no longer used", especially for older languages, is that there are undoubtedly *more* people using X now than there were in its heyday. There is simply a smaller percentage of all current programmers using it - because there is now an utterly ludicrous number of programmers around! After all, there probably isn't a market for more than five computers in the world.

PS

Lisp is the one of the two that is more likely to be correctly spelt in all-caps, as it is a shortened form of LISt Processing and hence (mis)treated like an initialism or an acronym; Forth never an acronym or initialism, it was only spelt in all caps because in its origins you could only use all caps for file names- and they weren't long enough to include the missing letter 'u'!

PPS

Raw Lisp uses prefix notation, but anyone doing a decently long-lived sized system (hopefully) defines a grammar to front end it (as also happens with other "AI languages", such as Prolog). The fact that Emacs didn't do that just seems - weird. Maybe nobody could actually figure out what "a language for defining interactive editing text" could/should look like?

Shellcode bytes in sequential order

Hang on, so to avoid detection all you need to do is just avoid writing

system("/bin/takeoversystem -now")

and replace the constant with a buffer filled by a few strcat()'s from strings declared in different places, with dummies in between and maybe a few Xor's to "hide" the contents of the strings?

That seems a lot easier than learning another language[1]

[1] but not as much fun, to the proper geeky coder, so are we really just seeing another phase of Revenge Of The Nerds? In which case, we can blame the jocks for being the root cause of it all!

Haven't you noticed the increase in line noise over the last few years? That is all being caused by a system running a genetic algorithm to randomly evolve Perl code. So far, we have been lucky, but one day it'll click into place and, with what seems like a burst of static, everything is pwned at once.

Or I may be remembering a horror movie - Pontypool?

Re: Lisp is in an amazing number of places

That really does sound like Forth and not Lisp: the first major use of Forth was for controlling radio telescopes (Chuck Moore worked at an observatory at the time he created the language).

Running a Lisp in an embedded controller is taking a big risk that the garbage collector needs to run at an inopportune moment. There are variants that purport to provide real time guarantees and you can alway try just triggering gc at known points, but on the whole IMHO there'd have to be a dang good reason to use Lisp versus anything more - shall we say "direct" - such as Forth. Now, splitting the system up, with a bigger computer running a Lisp-based planner and Forth (or C or ...) to drive the hardware via MCUs, that would play to each's strengths.

Mobile ad world drama: AppLovin not lovin' short seller assault claiming fraud

Dig deeper.

> Given the AI tools available today, it’s easy to discredit a short report like this in minutes.

Very true, you can get those things to spout all sorts of bullshit, even providing citations that *look* convincing...

(Insert cautionary tale about not sampling your own "product")

China cracks down on personal information collection. No, seriously

Come work for Japan Airlines, the pay is good, but...

> The app was tested in a pilot that ends today

So was the pilot about to retire anyway or is the removal of the app[1] not going a smoothly as the surgical team hoped?

[1] Yes which is precisely the sort of thing we need to know, I mean do people want fire^^^^apps that can be fitted nasally?

Today's jobs Microsoft thinks could use an AI assist: Researchers and analysts

Re: AI in Research

He blurted out what he thought of this MS - product - and was taken at his word; he is now deep in Brown Sector.

Re: Pardon?

That bit did seem strange, as I was told, more than once, that if I wanted to do some data visualisation then I ought to use Excel first, instead of "fiddling around" with any other tools, which require a bit of scripting or, gasp, using a command line.

So the idea that an advert for an MS product would go for fiddling with Python instead of giving whatever arcane incantations might make Excel do the job seems - odd.

PS

I didn't listen and will still reach for gnuplot etc rather than try and use a spreadsheet, let alone Excel, but that is just being ornery.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

PS/2 ports don't re-enumerate

Trying to tell KVM/QEmu to capture the mouse/keyboard device and pass it between host & guest requires[1] putting the USB-enumeration-generated device id into the XML config. So moving ports, or (far) worse having a glitch during a session and you've just lost the connection (and has it gone to the host, the guest - or is just flapping in the wind?)

[1] in the docs & examples I've found so far; pointers to better ways to do things gratefully accepted.

Re: Weight?

Well, my Northgate Omnikey Ultra weighs about 2.15 kg, so something older from IBM may easily be heavier.

Jeff Bezos can now taunt Elon Musk: I'm building a moon rover for NASA, when can Tesla do that?

> Just think what all the money spent by fantasists like Musk, Bezos, Gates etc on going to the Moon, Mars, or on equally useless and cliquey projects, could do for world health, welfare and peace if applied locally.

Not as much as you might think. Don't forget, there isn't any "money going into space", there is only a few lumps of (exquisitely crafted) metals, plastics etc.

All[1] of the money being spent is ending up, basically, giving people jobs - feeding, clothing, housing, improving physical and mental health, providing dignity[2]. Even if you don't believe that there are any other benefits, either short[3], medium[4] or long[5] term (or, for the hopelessly romantic/optimistic, the very long term[6]).

Go and have a look at the old idea of the Eccentric British Landowner, who spent their money on having Follies built: these provided the locals with work and wages. And all within The System, no need to try and Tear Down The Man[7], just that daft old buffer spending the family money on a pointless Summer House in the North Forty.

Yes, the modern lot could go about it with less of an eye on making a buck in return, and a healthy dose of humility (and "old bufferism") would go a long way to making them more palatable, but take what we can get.

[1] yes, yes, there are no doubt boondoggles and backhanders and all the rest, but so long as that also gets spent.

[2] even if current events puts paid to the idea that - certain people - actually have "giving people jobs" as one of their life goals, that is the (unintended) result.

[3] e.g. we may be pissed off at aspects of it, but satellite launch capability gives us Good Things, and the improvements in lift required for Moon/Mars/Manned missions can then be used for other things.

[4] There is no Planet B, but there are honking great lumps of rock out there, with our names on them; it would be nice to have a way to send up something big to give them a nudge

[5] materials science in space - along with all basic science - is valuable research, that all feeds back into the good of the human race (and other denizens of Earth).

[6] There is no Planet B, so there is merit in looking to settle the neighbourhood (Solar and stellar).

Fireball XL5 still showing on Talking Pictures TV, Sat 14:25.

Next episode: an Amazonian Queen has ben exiled into Spaaaaace![1]

[1] probably all to the best, as if she were undersea she'd have to wait for Stingray to be invented, in a few years' time (Supercar is only a two-seater, so where would an Amazon stow her bow?)

Domes on The Moon

Hasn't Commander Straker already investigated those?

Along with that one on the ocean floor, of course.

50 years ago the last Saturn rocket rolled out of NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building

My pleasure.

Can I recommend the LP "The Race for Space" by Public Service Broadcasting. You might like track 8, "Go!". But be prepared, it is not all light and upbeat before that point.

Re: So, what's developed in the last 50 years?

> It's not an explosion...

Although there is the rotating detonation engine, coming soon to a vehicle stack in your neighbourhood (fingers crossed - though fingers in ears may be more appropriate).

Microsoft walking away from datacenter leases (probably) isn't a sign the AI bubble is bursting

600kW and liquid cooling

What does that equate to in day to day units, like heating water for ISO standard cups of tea[1] and toasting crumpets?

[1] but don't warm the tea in the cooling loop!

VMware sues Siemens for allegedly using unlicensed software

Re: They’ll have to pay for software they can’t use

> On one side we have developers rolling in cash from software that can't be used but must be paid for and on the other we have developers quitting because of software that's widely used by people who refuse to pay a thing.

That first lot of "developers" are companies, shareholders and management.

That second lot are actual developers, acting as individuals.

Not exactly comparable groups.

EU OS drafts a locked-down Linux blueprint for Eurocrats

Re: RedHat is part of IBM

> Myabe the French would object?

Just point out it'll use LIBRE Office, so whilst the nationality of the kernel is known only to the nerds, all the Users will be speaking (a bit) of French.

You know that generative AI browser assistant extension is probably beaming everything to the cloud, right?

Re: What is the point?

If you should ever wish to witness confusion, bluster and even some anger ("how dare YOU ask of US.."), when someone offering a straightforward service insists that you install their app instead of using their website, politely but firmly inquire about the necessity of each of the app's permissions and their assurances against datarape of your device.

Web sites are rarely better, but with No Script etc you have at least *some* visibility and control.

There is hardly any science in the gathering of too much data from a web browser extension, you just need a metaphorical shovel instead of a spatula, but yes, making your plugin bloated in order to steal and monetise personal information[1] is an affront to engineering.

[1] unless the end user explicitly installed the extension in order that his data be snarfed, of course: supplying the customer with a system that fits his requirements, no matter how strange or self-defeating those requirements may seem, is a sine qua non of good engineering.

23andMe's genes not strong enough to avoid Chapter 11

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

Many a dusky maiden's head has been turned by a comely leek.

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

Reverend Paley, I presume?

Re: The court will now oversee the sale of 23andMe's assets

Do you stil have a copy of the contract?

Betcha it says they get to keep your profile (and probably the raw materials, to re-run as the price of doing that drops and the results get better, full sequences and not just a "profile") - and all the metadata attached to it (maybe they'll excise your name and address, or "anonymise" it to "keep it private").

But the only way these companies can do what they do (whatever that really is and however useless it is) is to keep all the data they have and cross-reference it. How do they "know" you are 12.7% Norse? Because you match with other people who sent in their samples and gave their birthplace as "in the cold hills of Midgard". Sure, they started with purchased samples from around the world, but they can be so much more "informative" now...

Museum digs up Digital Equipment Corporation's dusty digital equipment

Re: DEC in Ghostbusters

The tag line in Sweden, the USA etc was for Electrolux - over in the UK, the new company, Vax, were just being cheeky - and everybody seeing those boards knew that.

Re: DEC Rainbow from my youth

I so wanted to be able to disagree with, so carefully thought about all the kit I've owned.

The Cosmac CDP1892, Atom, BBC, Amiga (replacement after 1st one went), some favourite MCU boards - all still sitting around here, somewhere.

After that - all various PCs, with CPUs from different companies but otherwise, yes, replaceable. A few items I've hung onto (mostly the cases, really) but the guts have been stripped out and replaced, or still working bits moved down the line "and the one on the end fell out".

It is a glaring difference, from the unique points in each of the old stuff, that the only things I want to hang onto are the black anodised (how goth!) bent pieces of metal, because it turns out that those are the things that matter when it comes to usability & how I can stack the kit. Whilst the modern guts inside are ok, so long as they still work, but can then be junked with out too much drama (and I do love my drama).

Re: DEC in Ghostbusters

> Ordinarily, DEC never advertised publically

Oh, but we kept seeing display ads for Vax all over UK towns from the late 1970s on!

"Nothing sucks like a Vax" - it doesn't rhyme but when your programs refused to run...

The 6809 had a better programming model, especially for stack handling (the Forth inner loop was tiny, and fast) BUT the 6809 was also really expensive, compared to both the 6502 and the Z80. Being in the UK, after the CDP1802, a 6502 machine really was the next affordable choice to own myself (Acorn Atom, in a kit, of course). And then you grow to love the machine that you actually own (and whose solder joints had the remains of your finger prints in them).

Re: amazing documentation too

> original IBM PC (and AT) reference manuals

With the ring-binder BIOS listing - including the serial port code that "wasn't broken" yet somehow only worked after you'd copied it into your program and then swapped two config values around (eek, was it two adjacent bytes or two nybbles in one byte? Nybbles, IIRC). So if you had a working serial port, chances were you'd just pirated part of their (very) copyrighted BIOS...

Re: amazing documentation too

> RSTS/E

Good grief, I'd entirely forgotten RSTS! The Engineering department were running RSTS, whilst the Stats dept had Unix, CompSci had something entirely different and the Pr1me lurked elsewhere. In my day you had to look at your schedule and carry around the correct cheat sheets for that day! You try telling the youngsters that.

Trying to remember what the big machine in the Maths dept was...dang, all I can recall is that it filled the machine room one year, then it transmogrified into a couple of cabinets looking rather lost in the middle of all that space.

Did get locked away with in an office with a half-height Vax (nope, can't recall the model, rats) for a while in one job, running VMS: I do miss file version numbers.