Posts by Simon Harris 2816 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2007
Accidentally deleting photographs of the Enola Gay because they got mistaken for positive DEI messages might be considered a 'glitch'.
Accidentally firing critical staff and then having to rehire them might be considered a 'glitch'.
Accidentally CCing a newspaper editor into your top secret war planning discussions is a monumental fuck-up.
Do you have a problem with Trans people being astronauts?
And just so you know, ESA are already looking at the possibilities of amputees becoming astronauts
passed by Congress starts
Sec. 101. This act may be cited as the “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958”.
DECLARATION OF POLICY AND PURPOSE
Sec. 102. (a) The Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of the United States that activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.
and amended in 2010 to devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind
Maybe NASA should be reminded of the 'all' in there.
While this argument often gets rehearsed (and often for causes that I'm in favour of, for example the 28% who didn't bother to vote on Brexit is often touted as indicating that only about 37% were actually in favour of Leave), unless it can be shown that the majority of those not voting didn't because of voter suppression, then my view is that sadly you can only make conclusions based on those that actually did vote and that those who didn't vote didn't care enough one way or the other.
You could equally add in the eligible voters to argue the other way, and say 69%-ish of eligible voters (can't be arsed to do the exact maths) didn't mind if Trump became president.
I used to use that as my standard graphics editor, it was great until a Windows upgrade meant it didn't work any more. And not being willing to buy an updated version of PSP (partly because I'm a stingy bugger, partly because from the reviews it didn't look like the newer versions were as good as 6) switched to The GIMP.
The problem seemed to be GIMP appearing on a shared desktop. So, it's even simpler that that.
The icon is a dog or fox (not sure exactly which) holding a paintbrush, which is pretty inoffensive. If you're offended by the word 'GIMP', or think your Boomer or GenX clients would be offended (I'm a non offended early GenXer btw), then it's a simple matter to change the text description on the short cut to 'Picture Editor' or something. Hey presto, no more shocked clients.
True WYSIWYG was introduced in WordPerfect 6 when they gave the option of a full graphical screen in their MSDOS version (which IIRC was a bit slow) as well as the traditional blue text screen.
I think it was WordPerfect 5 or 5.1 that introduced a graphical print preview, although editing was purely text screen.
It has a doubtful future according to Wikipedia...
Designed to be mated with Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, and Vulcan Centaur. ULA have stopped producing the Atlas V apparently, the Delta IV has been retired, the Vulcan Centaur isn't yet human rated which leaves only the Falcon 9, which, of course, has it's own capsule and is the competition.
In 1991 Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalyov and Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Volkov were launched to the Mir space station on board Soyuz TM-12 (18 May 91) and Soyuz TM-13 (2 Oct 91) respectively from a Mikhail Gorbachev led USSR to form Expedition 10. On the 25 March 1992 they returned to Earth as Russian citizens with Boris Yeltsin as president.
I wonder if Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore will have a similar WTF moment when they return to Earth to a somewhat different country from the one they left.
(pedant alert: yes I know they haven't actually been out of radio contact and I'm sure they know what's been happening down here)
Algol-68 is the only language that I've been formally taught. When I started university in 1982 to study Electronic Engineering, we had to do a 1 term course in programming and, the university having an ICL mainframe at the time, Algol-68 was the language of choice.
It was the Algol 68-R version produced by the Royal Radar Establishment, with user guides produced by the Ministry of Defence.
I have never used it since. Every other piece of programming I did in my university days was either BASIC, Fortran or assembly code.
I would suggest anthropomorphising tools and objects is actually so ingrained into language that we don't even notice we're doing it a lot of the time.
An example that springs to mind is how often people refer to a piece of equipment with an intermittent fault as 'a bit temperamental'.
Also, of course, the maritime tradition of assigning a female gender to ships.
MAGA wanting to change the Gulf of Mexico to The Gulf of America is a petty irrelevance to the rest of the world, who will no doubt carry on calling it The Gulf of Mexico.
A bit like the Take Back Control mob changing the colour of our passports from burgundy to blue.
Just a bit of a 'yahh-boo' to appease their supporters that everyone else will just ignore.
I remember one of my school friends typing a letter on the school computer to the newsagent, pretending to be his dad, and asking the newsagent for a copy of Razzle (or whatever it was at the time, this was around 1980), and to preserve the boy’s innocence, to seal it in the plain brown envelope he took to the shop.
Amazingly, the subterfuge worked!
One use of self modifying code I’ve seen is fairly particular to the 6502.
The 6502 had indirect instructions- e.g.
LDA (addr),Y
LDA (addr,X)
but no index free version
LDA (addr)
(An omission corrected on the 65C02)
If you wanted an indirection without having to manage the X or Y register, I have seen code that patched the destination address into the two bytes after the LDA instruction. It also had the advantage that if you needed to access that address a lot, it saved a couple of cycles over the standard indirect instructions.
Similarly there was a JMP (indirect), but no JSR (indirect) - so again if you have a table of call addresses, you could patch the appropriate one into the code.
I think possibly worse, from a structured programming point of view is misuse of GOSUB linenumber. Since BASIC (until things like BBC BASIC came along) didn’t have a mechanism for defining a subroutine as a distinct block of code, you could GOSUB to multiple points within a subroutine, not just a nominal first line, so not only could your routine have multiple exit points, it could have multiple entry points too.
Also since there was no defined block structure, one subroutine could GOTO somewhere inside another and borrow its RETURN, so it was quite possible for one exit point to serve many subroutines.
Of course, with memory at a premium in the late 70s/early 80s, people would make clever use of these ‘poor programming practices’ to cram as much as possible into the small space available, even if it was a nightmare to try to work out what was going on.
"The Commodore 64 has only two cursor keys, one for horizontal motion and one for vertical. Use the shift key to pick left from right and up from down."
The Acorn Atom did that too, but put them at the left hand end of the keyboard instead of the right.
Also like the Electron, Break (reset) is just another key on the Atom keyboard, next to up arrow (its version of caret) and above delete. Quite easy to delete rather more than you were expecting, although fortunately the OLD command gets your program back if you do press it.
Yes, typing on the Oric-1 wasn't a particularly pleasant experience with that keyboard.
Schematics were for a pair of NPN transistors, which are in an configuration that works - I've used the 6847 a couple of times as an easy video display for embedded systems where the output wasn't too demanding and borrowed that circuit to get a video signal.
The glitching white spots weren't to do with the 50Hz/60Hz discrepancy as such, but because the dot clock on the 6847 ran on both edges of a 3.57MHz square wave (chosen because 3.57 NTSC colour burst crystals were cheap, and if I remember correctly, the 6847 would insert a few cycles of 3.57MHz after line sync for NTSC colour burst), while the 6502 ran at 1MHz.
When directly accessing video RAM, the 6502 took no notice of where the 6847 was in its pixel reading process and just enabled the bus buffers connecting video RAM data/address to the CPU bus, and switched off the address output of the 6847 for ~0.5us (possibly up to 1us, I can't remember whether the logic gated off the whole cycle or just the active part of the 6502's phi2). Hence the 6847 would momentarily output whatever the 6502 was reading/writing in video RAM, rather than what it was expecting to read/write.
Writing characters to the text screen didn't cause snow because the software polled the frame sync signal and only wrote text when it knew the 6847 was in a non-image part of the display, but doing that generally for bit mapped graphics would have slowed things down too much, so it was left down to software designers to decide whether or not to sync.
Possibly the worst culprit was the unexpanded Atom where the 1K of screen memory had the upper 512 bytes for program storage, so running a program in that configuration caused loads of screen 'snow'.
The 6809 in the TRS-80 colour computer runs at 0.89 or 1.78MHz (1/4 or 1/2 of the 3.57MHz) and I believe CPU access to video RAM is interleaved with the 6847 to prevent snow. I have a feeling you could remove the snow on the Atom by rewiring the clocks to run the 6502 at 0.89MHz, but I never tried - I always wanted the raw speed over a clean screen! (actually mine was quite happy being overclocked to 2MHz).
I never knew about the NPN/PNP transistor mix-up though - I'll have to check mine to see if they put the right ones in - it worked though!
Interestingly the NEC V20 could emulate an 8080 in hardware, as well as being a slightly enhanced 8088. In theory it could run CP/M programs natively, as CP/M was written for the 8080, although in practice after the Z80 came out later versions of CP/M and its applications started to use the Z80 extensions to the 8080 instruction set, which the V20 didn’t have.
In the ideal case you might expect your drones to have fall-back modes if one method of communication is blocked.
I wonder if the case here is that rather than being conventional military equipment, they might be a quick and dirty lash-up using off-the-shelf commercial equipment without all the backups to see if they can get it done on the cheap to rapidly fill a hole in their arsenal.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
