Re: There are only so many ways of clipping a signal.
Now I have a lovely vision of the Apollo circuits being entirely composed of interchangeable Denshi blocks :)
Posts by David 132
4307 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
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Linus Torvalds offers to build guitar effects pedal for kernel developer
UK prepared to throw planning rules out the window for massive datacenters
Monday 13th January 2025 21:22 GMT 
Re: Curious? Not really.
What amuses me is when new solar and - especially - wind farms are built, to hear the solemn undertakings from the owners that they'll be responsible for cleanup/disposal/restoration costs at the site's end-of-life.
"Yes", they say, trying hard to suppress sniggers and with their fingers crossed behind their backs, "in 30 years' time we'll pay to haul away these turbines, we'll pay to remove the giant concrete pads each one sits on, and we'll pay to restore the site to its previous pristine beauty."
In reality - and correct me if I'm being too cynical - when that day arrives, the company will have been sold, taken over, or gone into liquidation, and all those commitments will mysteriously no longer be the responsibility of the present asset owners.
And as for restoring the land to its former beauty? "Hey, look, a post-industrial site with lovely views of more countryside! It's brownfield! That means we can put 2500 Luxury Executive New Build homes on it!"
Grrr.
Celebrating when EVs went to the Moon with a Lego Lunar Roving Vehicle build
Saturday 11th January 2025 19:13 GMT
"We asked Lego why it did not create a custom part for the dish"
Noooo!
There are more than enough "custom parts" already. I miss the days when Technic Lego (and the other ranges) worked their wizardry with a comparatively limited stock of infinitely-repurposeable standard parts.
An example: the model of Shackleton's Endurance that was reviewed here recently. I noticed, and approved of, the fact that the designers used rack-and-pinion toothed pieces as "staircases" between the decks. The usual modern Lego way seems to be "let's mould a special staircase piece just for this one kit".
I still have my original 8860 Car Chassis model from 1980 - perched on a stand right behind me as I type this, in fact, although I admit I've had to replace the elastic bands that control the seat-recline and fanbelt mechanisms a few times over the decades.
Am I just being an old curmudgeon, or does anyone else agree?
Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES
Free-software warriors celebrate landmark case that enforced GNU LGPL
Friday 10th January 2025 19:10 GMT
Re: Good
> Perhaps they have seen the light as they didn't appeal.
We can hope. The acid test will be whether they continue to use (L)GPL-licensed code in their products, or move to using building blocks licensed under more commercially-permissive terms. Fingers crossed that they don't draw from this experience the lesson that "GPL is too onerous" :(
Just when you thought terminal emulators couldn't get any better, Ghostty ships
Thursday 9th January 2025 17:58 GMT
Re: Kitty
Ah, I'm glad I'm not the only one who loves Calibre but struggles with its UI.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not one of those superficial form-over-function types who wants everything to be skeuomorphic or artfully pale-grey-on-white with vast areas of unused space. But Calibre's UI is unnecessarily awkward, which is a shame because it's such an amazing tool for converting and editing e-books.
Thursday 9th January 2025 17:48 GMT
Re: Emulators?
I never had any problem quitting vi. Helped by a local support group and weekly meetings, I've been clean now for ten years.
More seriously, the fact that the Ed editor on the Amiga shared many of the same interface paradigms as vi meant that when I encountered the latter, I wasn't completely blindsided (and yes, was able to figure out how to exit, and even use it productively too.)
Wednesday 8th January 2025 23:04 GMT
I often use Cool Retro Term for preference - no, really - something about the amber text and scanlines puts me "in the zone" for terminal work. The CRT distortion, noise, flicker, and other visual effects are fun but perhaps not for long-term serious use :)
Yes, yes, I know. I am clearly weird and deranged and should be shunned.
Look for the label: White House rolls out 'Cyber Trust Mark' for smart devices
Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025
Tired of begging, Microsoft now trying to trick users into thinking Bing is Google
Tuesday 7th January 2025 05:29 GMT
Re: Devious yet inept
Wandering somewhat off topic but have you seen the Jeep commercial from a few years ago with Bill Murray, reprising his role in Groundhog Day?
Monday 6th January 2025 23:46 GMT
Re: Devious yet inept
Indeed. The point I was trying and yet failed to articulate is that if someone tries to force a product on me - with popups, dark patterns, nags - I will in most cases refuse to use it even if it is actually useful, as a point of principle. Yes, the words "nose", "cut off", "spite" and "face" come to mind, but I am what I am. Bing could be the best search engine in the multiverse - spoiler, it isn't - Edge the best browser, and signing in with a Microsoft account could cause cherubim & seraphim to sound celestial trumpets... but I won't use them.
Monday 6th January 2025 22:55 GMT
Re: Zero innovation so they manipulate users.
Upvoted. With a 3 quatloos deduction for making the common typo “better […] that” vs. “better than” - which for irrational reasons I don’t understand, annoys me far more than other common typos (“lose/loose”, “rogue/rouge”, etc.)
Not your problem. I should probably seek help.
Monday 6th January 2025 19:41 GMT
Devious yet inept
I can't speak for anyone else here, but my nature is such that I will use, or not use, something on its merits. If it does a better job than what I was using previously, I'll switch - BUT if someone tries to cajole/browbeat/trick me into using it - nope, I will rebel, kick sharply backwards, and make a point of not using it, because I dislike being manipulated. Other examples: Microsoft's constant nagging to use a Microsoft account to sign in; their tricks and wheedling to prevent me setting Firefox as my default browser; and their pushing of OneDrive.
Hmm, come to think of it, all those examples involve Microsoft. Maybe they're just more inept and unsubtle at manipulating me than other companies.
Japan's wooden satellite exits International Space Station
Thursday 9th January 2025 03:48 GMT
Or even easier, just glue a Tile™ or an Apple AirTag™ to the satellite and never lose it again, with the only requirement being as long as it's in bluetooth range of someone's phone.
On a related note, remind me, how "low" is "low Earth orbit"? Cos if we're talking 32' or less, this is definitely a viable solution and I are a rocket scientist and should get an award.
Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'
Tuesday 7th January 2025 21:26 GMT
Tuesday 7th January 2025 05:43 GMT
Re: Kicking and screaming
It’s also far from unheard of for this progression to occur over successive Windows updates:
-feature you don’t like can be turned off or bypassed with a button click
-> nope, but now it’s buried somewhere in Settings
-> no longer exposed in Settings but can be configured via Registry or GPOs
-> no known Registry keys; disabling the feature now requires arcane keypresses during setup and obscure & undocumented commands/switches
I’m thinking here primarily of the “set up Windows with a local account” functionality, but there are soooo many more examples.
A normal company, confronted with telemetry or anecdotal feedback that customers are turning off a feature, would re-think that feature, or at least make it better. Microsoft’s approach when confronted with such feedback, frustratingly, is to think of ways to stymie and block their customers from avoiding the feature.
Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster
Monday 6th January 2025 17:52 GMT
Re: Rocket Science
> But getting it right for all years as far as it is currently planned is really still easy.
Conversation circa 2097:
"Sir, we have an impending crisis. Many of our critical IT systems here on Earth-1 and throughout the Musk Galactic Empire will fail in just a couple of years time!"
"Why?"
"As far as we can tell, they were coded by - quoting job posting literature of the period - 'stupid junior programmers', who utterly failed to calculate the correct number of days for 2100."
(shocked pause)
"My goodness. This will make the reprogramming we had to do in '78 to account for the Great Collapsing Hrung Incident look positively trivial..."
How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software
Sunday 5th January 2025 20:17 GMT
Re: Developers! Developers! Developers!
Also, the point that - forgive me if I've missed it - no-one's made here yet is that OS/2's ability to run Windows applications was both brilliant, and extremely dumb.
Brilliant, because it opened up an immediate catalogue of software to OS/2 users.
Dumb, because why would developers now bother to write a separate OS/2 version, when they could simply write for Windows - as mentioned above, with enthusiastic support from Microsoft - and have both the Windows and OS/2 markets? And so in the longer term, it guaranteed OS/2's irrelevance.
Balmer was right about one thing - it really is "developers, developers, developers". Forgive me if I don't leap around the stage and scream that, though.
Shackleton's Endurance sets sail for polar peril in Lego
Tech support warrior left cosplay battle and Trekked to the office
Sunday 5th January 2025 01:42 GMT
Re: What's the weirdest outfit you've worn to a tech support job?
And good on you for wearing full leathers.
My brother, in his wild and carefree youth, was a keen biker, and sometimes grumbled about how hot and uncomfortable his leathers were on summer days.
Well, two incidents convinced him to endure a little discomfort!
The first was him piling at 60mph into a tractor and muck-spreader that turned out from a field onto the road straight in front of him. Weeks in hospital, surgery, metal plates in various bones, but he made a full recovery - no small thanks, the surgeons told him, to the kevlar reinforcement in his outfit.
After that, he found new purpose and pursued his first love - medicine, starting by volunteering with the St John's Ambulance, and progressing from there. Part of this involved him working stints in the A&E ward of the local hospital, where he saw with his own eyes the result of young lads coming off their bikes at speed clad in only T-shirt and jeans.
I believe the term used in that situation is "meat crayon".
My bruv never, ever again went out on his bike without full leather armour.
How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC
Saturday 4th January 2025 22:57 GMT
Re: A generation of gray-haired IT folks
You bastard. You owe me a new keyboard and possibly monitor for the effect that mental image had on me - see icon --->
:)
Also @Fruit and Nutcase - if they did, and such a transplant was performed on me, I suspect I'd end up looking like Cousin It. There is no shortage of donor material.
Saturday 4th January 2025 00:58 GMT
Re: Upvote for the mention of Blitz BASIC on the Spectrum
D'oh! You're absolutely right, and I clearly had a brainfart when I typed that. I meant Beta Basic of course.
In mitigation I can only offer that I was intrigued by Steelpillow's mention of the Blitz mode on SAM Basic and clearly that word was on my mind. I sort of wanted a SAM Coupe for a while, but by the time I'd saved up almost enough pennies for one, I'd discovered the existence of the Amiga and took a different track!
Friday 3rd January 2025 17:49 GMT
Upvote for the mention of Blitz BASIC on the Spectrum
BB was one of my first purchases* after I received my Spectrum+ in 84/85. It allowed flood-fill (well, slowly-rising-ooze fill, technically), true circles, 80-column text, and all sorts of other enhancements.
The manual, as I recall, was printed as an A5 booklet, in black ink on red paper to deter photocopying.
A pint for the BB author!
*my very first purchase was Elite, from a shop in London on a day-trip to the Big Smoke. I remember opening the box and admiring the LensLok on the train on the way back North. And then cursing that same LensLok when I couldn't get the darn thing to let me play the game :)
Edgio bankruptcy results in endpoint change for Microsoft
Christmas 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers
Tuesday 31st December 2024 02:16 GMT
Re: Glory Days
I well remember the Acorn Teletext adapter; my school had one of them, in one of the primary school classrooms. I used it once or twice, what must have been 40 years ago now. As I recall it was the same size, and Acorn Beige colour, as the "Tube" second processor unit.
Aaaand that's just sent me down the Ebay rabbit-hole. Who knew that there's now such a thing as a USB-C PSU replacement for the BBC B??? I am impressed.
Monday 30th December 2024 18:57 GMT
Re: 1984: The last hurrah for 8-bit home computers
Also the very fine Spectrum Next that I have right in front of me on my desk here!
Z80 compatible, with a colossal 2MB of RAM, near-instantaneous SD card storage, and up to a 28MHz core clock speed. 10-year-old me would have been insufferably smug in front of the other kids at school :)
OpenAI plans to ring in the New Year with a for-profit push
Monday 30th December 2024 18:49 GMT
Re: Hang on
It's the requirement for "supervision" and "careful checking of the output" that will doom LLM-based AI, or possibly the human race.
Consider the current state-of-the-art in "self driving cars".
They work very well... until suddenly they don't, and the meatbag behind the steering wheel gets an alert tone and has about 1 second (at most) to go from a state of distracted, book-reading, staring-vacantly-into-the-distance - to full comprehension of the situation and readiness to take corrective/evasive action. That's asking a lot of humans. I mean, I've been known to go in milliseconds from being asleep to being fully awake and vertical, but that's only when my subconscious brain hears my dog starting to retch & throw up in the corner of the room. Trust me, you don't sleep through that more than once :)
The output of LLMs runs up against the same limitation. They can be trusted X% of the time... until they can't. And the higher X goes, the more complacent we'll become, and the harder it'll bite us when they fall down and we don't spot it. "We can put AI in charge of medical diagnosis! We can put AI in charge of monitoring the skies for missile defence!" and so on.
Humans, in general, are fundamentally lazy. That's why we have spent so much of recorded history developing labour-saving devices, and it's why we're really, really bad at maintaining a state of constant alert and eagle-eyed supervision.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
