Posts by Simon Harris

Re: The location of the task bar?

Here's a list of things you did recently.

Yes... and now I want to do something else.

I liked the Windows XP/7 program launcher on the start button where things stayed where they were.

The default settings of the news widget are a Windows enforced ADHD. Accidentally drag your mouse too far to the bottom right and page after page of useless and often outdated trivia and listicles takes over.

Re: Trying to put age verification on VPN's is deeply silly

Just curious: for anyone in the education system these days...

When I was at school, computing facilities consisted of a second hand PDP8/e and a couple of SWTPC 6800 systems that the head of Computer Science had built himself. By the time I left a (singular) BBC Micro had been added to that collection.

Now we're way into in the era of networked school computers, do they encourage the use of school VPNs to enable pupils to access networked school resources for homework when off campus?

Edit: I suppose such VPNs could be fairly easy to identify and be whitelisted.

Re: Let's see a compiler for BBC BASIC

But which BBC BASIC?

The original 6502 BBC Micro one, or one of the more modern ones that Richard Russell has been updating with new features for the last 30+ years?

Re: Doesn't include the path to the native C library on your system

Oy!

Being a resident of south-west London, I do, on occasion, take the Clapham omnibus.

5V wasn't really the problem at the speeds we're talking about. Even the 486DX2 and 68040 were 5V devices with bus speeds of 25-33MHz.

IIRC, CP/M's a pain because the Z80 needs ROM at 0000 to start up, but then CP/M needs RAM at 0000, so the boot procedure has to start up, move the ROM, and page in the RAM in its place.

Not too hard to do if you're working from scratch, but needs some work with a soldering iron and a bit of extra logic patched in on a flying lead if you're retrofitting it to something it wasn't intended for.

Re: Will it progress like Full Self Driving did?

only when there's direct line of sight between the Moon and The Philippines.

Re: Cheaper source

Indeed, the world is not short of ISS Mockups. There's a dry one too at the Johnson Space Center

https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/space-vehicle-mockup-facility/

and also various Russian mockups.

Re: Cheaper to get an original Beeb

Nice - I see there's even an Atom option in the #defines :)

Re: Cheaper to get an original Beeb

These days you'll probably need a composite PAL/RGB to HDMI converter as well to make an original Beeb show anything on a modern TV.

It's getting hard to find new TVs with old style composite inputs.

Re: Sounds awful

Quite horrified today when I noticed in Task Manager than Notepad, which I currently have open with about 8K in total of text files, has apparently grabbed 110 MBytes of RAM. But why? What does a supposedly simple text editor do with it all?

"There are definitely alternate universe 'What If's to be had, not only what if IBM had gone ... with a 68000 processor..."

There was the short lived IBM System 9000.

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

"just didn't have the elegance of the 6502, 6809 and 68000 processors"

and then there's the craziness of the 65C816.

Re: CP/M·86

I remember the Victor 9000/Sirius 1 used to run CPM-86 in addition to MS-DOS.

As an early contemporary of the IBM PC, it was actually pretty well specced, but not very compatible.

Re: "handle 16 separate segments of 64 KB – for a total of one whole megabyte"

One of the sources of annoyance with the way segment registers worked is that when you were compiling software you had to select the memory model you wanted - if I remember correctly you had a choice of 5:

everything (code, data) shared the same 64K segment.

code and data could each be up to 64K, but in different segments.

code was up to 64K, but data could be larger.

code was as large as you wanted, but data was up to 64K

code and data could each be larger than 64K.

The problem that resulted was that let's say you opted for one of the smaller memory models in version 1 of your software, and then your program or data requirements grew and you wanted to create a more capable version 2 - it could suddenly mean that either or both of your 16-bit data or function pointers could suddenly change to 32-bits, which had the capability of royally screwing things up, particularly if they were parts of data structures, and meant the sizes of those structures changed. If serialising data to save it consisted of just dumping a block of memory to disc (and remember storage was limited and speeds weren't that great so it was common to copy it out the fastest way possible), you could easily create incompatibilities between data from old and new versions.

Incidentally, long pointers were often stored as Segment:offset. Since the segment register was 16 bits, you have the added inefficiency of needing 32 bits to represent a 20 bit physical address, and as someone pointed out elsewhere, that meant a whole load of different segment:offset combinations representing the same physical address making long pointer comparisons a pain.

Re: I can believe it

"speaking the lines of M.A.S.H. about 15·20 seconds before the actors."

My ex would do that with Shakespeare. Bit annoying when you're actually trying to watch the play!

Re: Can it improve the Harry Potter books?

"When I eventually read the text I was struck how derivative the material was"

When I first came across Harry Potter, another novel, written some 29 years previously, immediately came to mind. This is Wikipedia's introduction to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

"It is regarded as a classic of children's literature and of fantasy, within which it is widely influential. The story is set in the fictional archipelago of Earthsea and centers on a young mage named Ged, born in a village on the island of Gont. He displays great power while still a boy and joins a school of wizardry, where his prickly nature drives him into conflict with a fellow student. During a magical duel, Ged's spell goes awry and releases a shadow creature that attacks him. The novel follows Ged's journey as he seeks to be free of the creature."

Incidentally, the Earthsea books are well worth reading.

Actually it's quite common on 12" rulers to have half the inches scale marked in 16ths, and half marked in 10ths.

Not surprised it fails at that.

It hasn’t yet managed to produce a correct wiring diagram and appropriate passive component values for a 555 astable circuit whenever I’ve asked, and that’s probably one of the most duplicated schematics online.

"doing it away from other people."

I do a lot of coding when it's quiet (mostly because when other people are around they want me to do other things!), but I do rely on other real people on Stack Overflow and other platform specific forums for help when I hit an intractable problem.

Re: You weren't there, man

"you would continue to think about efficiency and better coding practices throughout life."

I used to be in the situation where I had to think about efficiency. My first computer had 5K of program space, and I've programmed EPROMs and PICs down to the last byte.

Efficiency doesn't always yield better coding practices - when you've got a hard limit of the end of your ROM space sometimes you have to take short cuts to make things fit, and from a coding practice perspective they didn't always look nice!

To cover a wide variety of coding problems you need a lot of sample code to build your patterns from.

You could cover at least some of the 'power of 10' rules by filtering the learning examples to be just those that follow the rules (e.g. ensuring no training data includes gotos, no compiler directives other than #include, #define, very restricted use of pointers, etc.) so it doesn't 'know' code outside of the power of 10 coding subset. However, I doubt there is enough power of 10 code in the wild to cover the spectrum of questions likely to be asked of it.

This would require a lot of manual work to 1. curate any 'power of 10' code that does exist, and 2. rewrite and validate a significant amount of non-compliant examples that do exist to provide a wide enough training base of code.

While that might go some way to getting it to produce power of 10 compliant code, by virtue of it not having patterns for certain non-compliant coding structures, I doubt it would be enough to ensure an LLM produced code that completely followed the rules, and it would be a mammoth human undertaking to create the training data, rather than lifting non-compliant code from the many sources where that already exists.

"I know hardly anything about Python, and don't really have the desire to learn." ... "Looking at the code, it seems quite good."

Personally I wouldn't profess to be able to judge the quality of the code if I knew hardly anything about the language, but that's just me.