Sound on the Speccy was only 1-bit glory!
Posts by Toastan Buttar
806 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2008
Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble
At last: The BBC Micro you always wanted, in Mastodon form
Re: BASIC
BASIC was the native language of most home micros. However, more importantly, it was also the Operating System and Command Line Interpreter / Shell of those same home micros. If you wanted to load a game written in assembly language from tape, you would perform those actions through the BASIC command line.
An interpreted language like BASIC is ideal for getting your head round programming concepts for the first time. You can break into programs, examine the contents of variables and GOTO whichever line you want. All without recompiling or running under a debug environment. And generally speaking, you can't crash the system if you don't POKE about or use a machine code CALL.
IF you decide to get into programming, and start to feel the limitations of BASIC, THEN you should GOTO a software catalogue for your machine and READ about what alternative languages are available. Only a tiny subset of micro users would have done this back in the day.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of 1980s home micro owners went on to have a career in software engineering. LESS interesting to know is how many Reg readers started off their career by being exposed to BASIC on a 1980s home micro. A bit like comparing how many heroin addicts started off smoking pot vs how many pot smokers 'graduated' to using heroin.
The 'nothing-happened' Y2K bug – how the IT industry worked overtime to save world's computers
What is your greatest weakness? The definitive list of the many kinds of interviewer you will meet in Hell
Who needs the A-Team or MacGyver when there's a techie with an SCSI cable?
Register Lecture: Can portable atomic clocks end UK dependence on GNSS?
Cubans launching sonic attacks on US embassy? Not what we're hearing, say medical boffins
Junior minister says gov.UK considering facial recognition to verify age of p0rn-watchers
Shut Up and Dance (Black Mirror)
That would never be hacked by miscreants, would it?
"- I only looked at pictures and - "
"And beat one off on camera? That's what they got, yeah? Your hot little face, blurred fist, dick burping f_cking spunk everywhere?
"Your mum's gonna love that on Facebook, Twitter, Insta-f_cking-whatever.
"And her friends.
"All eyes on you, giving it that.
"Toss in the c_nts at work, calling you Spurty McGoo.
"Laughing at your come face, making it their desktop wallpaper"
Army Watchkeeper drone flopped into tree because crew were gazing backwards
Excuse me, but have you heard the teachings of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Chr-AI-st?
On the seventh anniversary of Steve Jobs' death, we give you 7 times he served humanity and acted as an example to others
Boffins build the smallest transistor, controlled by an atom
Will the defendant please rise? Utah State Bar hunts for sender of topless email
Batteries are so heavy, said user. If I take it out, will this thing work?
MS Edit vs Edlin
My brother worked for a bank before retiring. During the '90s, he would sometimes have to demonstrate something on another department's PC (running some variant of MS-DOS and 16-bit Windows). I was visiting him one evening and he explained what he was going to demonstrate the next day, which involved editing a text file through the command line (it may have been CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT). He was reasonably familiar with the MS-DOS commands and EDIT, having a PC at home in those "pre-internet" days. However, I warned him that older versions of MS-DOS wouldn't have EDIT available - he'd have to use EDLIN instead. I gave him a quick tutorial on the basics.
Turns out that he did in fact have to revert to EDLIN. Thereafter, he was held in awe as some sort of programming guru by his banking colleagues.
RIP, Swype: Thanks for all the sor--speec--speedy texting
Third NAND dimension makes quad bit bucket cells feasible
Fractional bits are pure madness
Using an integer number of bits per cell already leads to inefficiencies.
For example, in order to read a random page of data from a 3BPC flash device, the controller firmware has to perform the following steps:
1. Read the wordline at 3 different comparison levels
2. Store these intermediate wordlines in RAM
3. Perform a series of Boolean logic functions on the intermediate worldines to extract the noisy page of data and its noisy ECC bits.
4. Combine the noisy page and ECC data to extract the original, uncorrupted written data.
If your storage system spreads the ECC data between the three stored pages, then you must read the entire wordline at 7 different comparison levels in step 1. Store 7 intermediate wordlines in RAM. Perform 3 times the number of Boolean logic functions that you did in step 3 to extract all three noisy pages of data and ECC bits. Combine all three pages of noisy data and ECC to extract three uncorrupted pages as written initially.
Extending this to fractional numbers of bits per cell would necessitate reading MULTIPLE WORDLINES at MULTIPLE THRESHOLD LEVELS and applying bizarre Boolean logic functions to extract your noisy data+ECC pages. This ignores the complex maths involved in applying something like BCH to generate ECC in a fractional bit scenario. Yes, it's possible in theory, but in practice it's ugly beyond belief. The complexity (and hence cost) that this would add to firmware design and testing would swamp any possible gain in storage.
In short, you'd have to be certifiably insane to propose introducing fractional bits to commercial NAND devices.
"Genuinely, why is SLC called that?"
Possibly because there was a single /threshold/ voltage comparison level to determine whether a cell represented a '0' or '1' on read.
MLC (for 2 bits per cell) covers the use of three comparison levels to fully decode two stored pages.
This however does not justify the extension of the nomenclature to TLC for 3-bits-per-cell technology.
Why the industry didn't just call it BPC (Bits-Per-Cell) from the beginning, I'll never know.
Why Boston Dynamics' backflipping borg shouldn't scare you
Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference
Re: History of Digital Telepathy
To Harry Stottle. A wonderful piece of work. Have a thousand upvotes. I had the exact same thoughts about a month or so ago, but I do not have the gumption or the talent to put them together in such a way. Thank you for articulating the concept.
My extension to the idea was to have a central AI which had access to everyone's recordings, and which could 'join the dots' between various experiences of the same situation. If judgement was requested by any of the participants in an incident or dispute, then the AI would reveal the encrypted evidence as required.
I think most people would allow recordings 24/7 because every time an injustice was resolved, the benefits would outweigh any doubts.
A twist in the tale: A Messiah figure who decides from an early age that he wants no further personal recordings. Haven't thought through the implications, yet. Of course, there will be a million EXTERNAL recordings of his actions from other citizens, which could be stitched together by the AI. Unless he lives as a recluse.
Samsung to let proper Linux distros run on Galaxy smartmobes
90 per cent of the UK's NHS is STILL relying on Windows XP
iPhone lawyers literally compare Apples with Pears in trademark war
Base specs leak for Windows 10 Cloud – Microsoft's wannabe ChromeOS assassin
Manchester pulls £750 public crucifixion offer
Londoners will be trialling driverless cars in pedestrianised area
Dark net webmail provider Sigaint still in the, er, dark
You're taking the p... Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has universal password: 'p'
Will Wikipedia honour Jimbo's promise to STOP chugging?
Re: What to do?
If you feel that £20 is fair payment for years of free use, then you shouldn't reclaim.
I've paid into the fundraiser for at least the past three years, and I will keep doing so in order to keep it ad-free, if nothing else. It's one of my (if not THE) most used sites on a daily basis.
Apple’s macOS Sierra update really puts the fan into 'fanboi'
Don't want to vote for Clinton or Trump? How about this woman who says Wi-Fi melts kids' brains?
Good gravy, Toshiba QLC flash chips are getting closer
4 bits per cell tech is so last decade.
SanDisk had a 43nm 4-bits-per-cell (x4) die in production in the noughties.
https://www.sandisk.co.uk/about/media-center/press-releases/2009/2009-10-13-sandisk-ships-world%E2%80%99s-first-flash-memory-cards-with-64-gigabit-x4-(4-bits-per-cell)-nand-flash-technology
The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know
Signed
Don't normally 'do' online campaigns, but I found this a significant cause. Very few people in my extended family have ever smoked, and neither have I. However, I truly sympathise with those who attempt to quit for good, or who want to continue, whilst reducing the harm of their addiction.
If I could give you 100 upvotes for all your posts on this topic, I would.
Alphabetti spaghetti: SanDisk adds SLC cache to TLC SSD
Re: SLC MLC TLC
Each block in a MLC die can be erased as desired (MLC or SLC) by the firmware on board. Same goes for TLC. It usually makes sense to permanently partition the blocks in such a way that the important stuff (or stuff which is going to be re-written many, many times) is stored in SLC. Whilst it would make more sense to keep this partitioning static, as you say there's nothing in the physics to prevent you doing it dynamically. It's just FAR more difficult to keep track of wear-levelling, etc in the dynamic case, with very little benefit to be gained in real-world use-cases.
Alice, Bob and Verity, too. Yeah, everybody's got a story, pal
Sir Clive Sinclair in tech tin-rattle triumph
Longing to bin Photoshop? Rock-solid GIMP a major leap forward
Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement
Microsoft to OneDrive users: We're sorry, click the magic link to keep your free storage
@jeremy 3: Re: Never clear
"It is so integrated with Windows, it is practically impossible to not use it."
Bullshit. Just don't use it and you......erm.......not use it.
I have used Windows 7 for yeeears and Windows 10 for a couple of months, and there is nothing which enforces use of OneDrive. Please explain your nebulous assertion.
Re: Oh Microsoft,@ Roq D. Kasba
"I suspect Roq D Kasba is a US based Microsoft apologist."
205 posts would make me suspect that you are a cockwomble, AC. Grow some yarbles and post under your Forum Name so that we can check out YOUR posting history. If you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou!