* Posts by ThomH

2913 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Hey, Mac fanbois: Got $600,000 burning a hole in your pocket? Splash out on this rare Apple I

ThomH

Re: 'Computing revolution'?

On the one hand, and despite their gross overrepresentations, I accept that Apple were one of the companies that helped to bring huge groups of people into the home computer market.

On the other, it seems counterintuitive that a company could produce the computer that started the revolution... if there was already a 'Byte-Shop' to carry the product. That sounds a lot more like a revolution that had already begun.

ThomH

I guess that depends on how much further appreciation you foresee in the Apple I's future — in the noughties if you were lucky you could get one for 'only' $20,000. With hindsight that would have been a good investment.

I'm not expecting similar further growth but since the history of prices don't seem to follow any sort of rational pattern of growth, my expectations are clearly fallible.

Five actually useful real-world things that came out at Apple's WWDC

ThomH

Re: I thought browser fingerprint hiding deserved a mention.

So now I'm actually going to have to do the not-a-robot tests? Probably worth it.

If there is ever a robot uprising, all we need to do is drive at them in our cars. Apparently being able to tell which roads have cars on them proves you're not a robot.

ThomH

Re: macOS password management seems screwed anyway?

I think your method of questioning might be at fault; Safari stores all passwords in the keychain. Open Keychain Assistant, switch to passwords, enter any website name in the search field and there are the entries that correlate to my passwords. Double click one, tick the 'show password' box, enter my system password and there it is.

ThomH

@wolfetone

It's stored associated with only a randomised ID as metadata, and it loses that association after six months. It then survives untethered for the remaining eighteen.

I'd therefore posit that it's being used for Siri training, not for the sake of "acquiring personal behavioural data".

That is to answer your question literally. It doesn't make me a lot happier to know that my requests would be stored for two years even if they didn't have details attached that more explicitly identify me. That's partly why I don't use Siri, though my main justification is the same as for the other voice assistants: I'm unclear of any situation in which they'd be useful for me.

ThomH

Re: Damn it @CheesyTheClown

As a fellow MacBook Air 2011 owner, it's also a little sad for me that it will exit the list of Macs that receive the latest version of the OS with the next release, 10.14. Certainly if your issue is that you find Apple devices only talk well to other Apple devices then you might as well write that out of the set of mutually talkative devices in the near future; they don't explicit switch these things off but proprietary protocol rot takes its toll. My iOS 5 and iOS 9 iPads can still play video content from iTunes but the iOS 9 device that's supposed to sync with my iTunes Match now inexplicably offers only maybe a twentieth of my content.

That being said, I'll be back for a newer Mac and an iPhone update if and when my 6s becomes a burden; I'm not particularly interested in home automation, habitually rent movies through Amazon rather than iTunes, and my iPhone works flawlessly with my Garmin watch.

The great wearables myth busted: Apps never, ever mattered

ThomH

I bought my Garmin for run tracking. I have unexpectedly also found occasionally useful its display of notifications from my phone, but often more so the fact that it buzzes when it displays one so that even if my phone is somewhere deep in a coat pocket I don't tend to miss texts or emails from the few people I'd already told my phone it was okay to generate notifications for. That, with its week-and-a-bit battery life is plenty smart enough for me.

So, I think I'm arguing: not only was it bought it for a purpose, which it performs very well, but it's exceeded that usage. So I'm all for Garmins.

President Trump broke US Constitution with Twitter bans – judge

ThomH

Re: Actually, this decision doesn't matter anyway.

Agreed; also it feels like the real offence would be continuing the behaviour now that the law is clear. Not being able to see this outcome coming doesn't seem all that troubling.

Put another way: even if the verdict stands and it definitely is true under US law that Trump's actions violated the First Amendment, do you think he was actually motivated by the desire to restrict people's legal freedom of speech? I feel like he's unwittingly stumbled into the non-obvious violation.

If someone is really crooked, get them for something that's really crooked.

ThomH

Re: Ha

The plaintiffs are seven people who were blocked and the Knight First Amendment Institute, which as the name suggests has the sole purpose of defending the First Amendment. The court's verdict was solely on the grounds of the Constitution and its case law.

Are you suggesting that the Constitution shouldn't apply to people who preferred the loser in an election? Or maybe that what the Constitution means or doesn't mean should be whatever the current government decides?

You're extremely naive if you've bought into the version of the world where everything that happens is entirely framed by partisan politics. The cause of the collision is: Trump is using social media in a completely unprecedented way, and the Constitution says a lot about freedom of speech. This has happened now because this is really the first time it could have happened.

ThomH

Re: First Amendment Violation?

I'm on the fence but I can understand the logic behind the conclusion.

The First Amendment speaks in absolute terms of making no incursions upon freedom of speech, and this case applies the usual sensible modification of that re: public forums. Any restriction is an incursion — that they could speak elsewhere (or elsewhere on Twitter) isn't a defence. The most controversial part of that to me seems to be in finding Trump's feed to be a relevant 'public forum'.

The court isn't compelling Trump to create a public forum, it merely found that he had already created one through use of his account for policy discussion. Having created one, his ability to exclude people is then subject to the law.

The difference between this and those kicked out of public meetings for being rowdy, obnoxious or rude is that the court was considering those excluded based on the content of their opinions, not their behaviour.

ThomH

Re: So... @BronetKozicki

I'm not sure about that; the issue here seems to be that Trump's tweets and their replies count as a public forum because of the policy nature of their content, and that banning users from seeing his tweets while logged in limits their ability to take part in that public forum. So the breach isn't the not talking to them, it's the limiting of their opportunity to reply. It's the prohibition on their speech that's problematic, not their hearing.

I might be misunderstanding of course.

ThomH

Re: So...

No, but if the next President had a press conference, then disallows people who have expressed contrary opinions from being able subsequently to discuss the content of his press conference then that too would be a violation of the Constitution.

'Clive, help us,' say empty-handed ZX Spectrum reboot buyers

ThomH

I guess people expected a better result because the same company had already managed to produce a Spectrum console with the same funding model, and a portable version really shouldn't be very hard.

What's up with that ZX Spectrum reboot? Still no console

ThomH

Re: Still no console

When two ROMs bump into each other on a data bus, their seemingly-immutable values become intertwined. Has some all-seeing force chip selected them both for a reason? Find out this summer, as these two realise: random access isn't something that only happens to other memories!

ThomH

"Donald Trump reckons $1 million is a small loan in fairness."

I suspect this is not the most substantial thing that most of us would disagree with Donald Trump about.

The Register is right to track the story regardless; it's primarily about the practicalities of crowdfunding — that those who responded to particularly-worded invitations so as to create a contract of sale aside, contributors more or less just have to trust that the recipients will actually do the thing they sought the money for. No transparency, little obvious recourse.

Indiegogo sending in receivers in order to protect their brand would be unprecedented. So that they're this close is newsworthy.

Apple MacBook butterfly keyboards 'defective', 'prone to fail' – lawsuit

ThomH

Re: It was all downhill from the Apple Extended Keyboard II

Call me a loser if necessary: I prefer the contemporaneous Apple Standard Keyboard. It's the same Alps keys, escape is in the right place, and control is still in the right place (i.e. where caps lock is nowadays), but the whole thing is much more compact — no F keys, no cluster between the main keyboard and the numeric keyboard. The cursor keys are in a row rather than a T but that took all of five minutes to acclimatise to, and I basically never use the del key. Also I feel like option+backspace was del at the time, rather than being delete a whole word as it is now, but it might have been some other combination.

ThomH

I'm a Model M owner who also has the original 2015 Retina MacBook, with the first generation of the new keyboard. Here's the level of praise I can muster: it's not terrible. I've typed on much worse; they beat long travel but spongey. They look a lot worse than they are — my visions of a ZX81 or, at best, a 48kb ZX Spectrum were way off the mark.

But it's still not my favourite experience. Though it does still work after three years, no problems whatsoever. Whatever the failure rate is, high or not, I can vouch that it's certainly not 100%.

ThomH

Re: The only Mac I ever owned had the worst keyboard I've ever used

Was it a MacBook Air? The screens on every Mac are fantastic... other than the MacBook Air. Poor angles, poor colour — and the only ~100dpi screens left in the line-up. It's not even a case of Apple leaving another model out to pasture; the screens were noticeably worse than the others at launch.

Commodore 64 owners rejoice: The 1541 is BACK

ThomH

Re: Amiga disk drive

The Kryoflux arguably improves on the Catweasel by being a USB device with Mac and Linux support in addition to Windows but it's basically the same price at €99.95 and doesn't try to help with any other peripherals for anything.

ThomH

Re: "Taking over two minutes to load a 64 kilobyte into memory was maddening."

To add to that, the 1541 is also actually slower than the 1540 it replaces. They're physically the same device with a ROM swap, but both ended up oriented around bit-bashing the serial port at a rate that they could expect a busy-polling 6502 to be able to read. The C64 obtains the memory bandwidth necessary to double the Vic-20's output resolution by excluding the 6502 from the bus for one pixel line out of eight and buffering the tile map. So whereas the 6502 in the Vic-20 goes at a constant speed, the 6502 in the C64 suffers a line-length pause reasonably frequently. Therefore the data transmission rate had to be slowed to make sure the C64 wouldn't miss anything.

It's not a big difference but Vic-20 owners with a 1541 can obtain a mild speed-up by switching the drive into Vic-20 mode. In classic Commodore fashion, it's an arcane command that repurposes file transfer, a lot like $ being the file you load to get a BASIC listing that contains the disk catalogue.

Still nowhere near as fast as a turbo loader though; it's still one 6502 bit-bashing the two signals on the serial bus at a rate it knows isn't too fast for a listening 6502 to deal with but while maintaining the proper serial bus protocol in case the other end is ever upgraded with a race-condition-free incoming shift register.

ThomH

I'm the author of an ordinary software-in-your-computer 1541 emulator — the concept is nothing new, the chips are very well understood. Regardless of the article's comments about the 6522, doing it as a proper real-time process compatible with the original signalling is the interesting bit.

That being declared, I disagree with the reasoning for your guarantee. Emulating proper physical timing is pretty trivial, especially if you've a whole Ghz-level ARM at play.

To my mind the main obstacle is more likely to be the Commodore file formats: the most advanced one, G64, is a "raw bit stream" that permits multiple speed zones per track and atypical track lengths, with half-track positioning but all data within a speed zone is implicitly perfectly clocked and of perfect amplitude. So amongst other things, weak bits and fuzzy bits are not conveyed by G64.

Some of us have a full pretend PLL in our emulations; I'll wager that was omitted.

Exclusive to all press: Atari launches world's best ever games console

ThomH

The Atari 2600 Space Invaders is a 4kb cartridge. Close enough?

Reg man straps on Facebook's new VR goggles, feels sullied by the experience

ThomH

Re: For the majority of people

I'll up that: watching movies while flying economy.

Supercycle to su-'meh'-cycle: Apple iPhone warehouses heave with unsold Notches

ThomH

Re: iPhone 6 user here

As a 6s user, I think the only thing that'd motivate me to update any time soon would be a dramatic improvement in battery life. I'd be a lot happier if that were to happen for a reason other than my current device's battery ageing out*.

* still at 86% of maximum capacity per the battery health panel, but it doesn't seem to last the day any longer so I'm not sure I believe that. I'm probably going to hold out until December and then take part in the battery replacement programme while the price is still reduced.

Press F to pay respects to the Windows 10 April Update casualties

ThomH

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

The other advantage of CHM files is binding the lifetime of the documentation to the lifetime of the application. Windows is supposed to be the platform that cares about backward compatibility; the push to server-based everything — including help files — strongly undercuts that.

Bill Gates declined offer to serve as Donald Trump's science advisor

ThomH

Surely being made to watch a box set of the Big Bang Theory would violate the US constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment?

Apple's QWERTY gets dirty, leaving fanbois shirty

ThomH

$700 is more than the cost of the logic board

As someone who has recently used the service, the current cost charged by Apple for an out-of-warranty replacement of the original Retina MacBook's logic board — i.e. the single component that comprises the CPU(/GPU), RAM and SSD — is $475 for the part plus $100 for the labour.

So it's more than 20% more expensive to replace the keyboard than it is all the bits that actually constitute the computing part of the computer? Somebody definitely needs to go back to the drawing board on that design, I think.

There is no perceived IT generation gap: Young people really are thick

ThomH

Re: Unverständnis

Worüber man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

The law of run Nintendo consequences: Sega brings out mini Mega Drive / Genesis

ThomH

Re: So exactly what they've been letting AtGames sell for years?

Having hastily performed some ninja research: the older ones are composite only. The 2017 model supports HDMI. All are software emulators and the newer ones — they've been doing these for almost a decade — are built atop Android. I couldn't find specific information on the older machines, but the HDMI model allegedly features the emulation work of Marat Fayzulin, who wrote a lot of '90s-style emulators* back in the '90s, but fell of the public radar after that. From LinkedIn it looks like he went into Intel to write emulators for upcoming Intel architectures, so I'm sure he's not still writing '90s-style emulators. Nevertheless, reviews of it are pretty dire but a member of the company on AtariAge insists it's because an unspecified manufacturing error caused audio, frame rate and graphical glitches in all the review units but has been resolved since. Draw your own conclusions.

At least putting it out again will invite fresh reviews, to verify that claim.

* in the sense of inaccurate as dictated by available processing. Usually involves pretending that instructions are atomic, that different ICs actually take turns to run for prolonged periods, etc.

ThomH

You're helping retro hardware to live on. And on. And Ariston.

ThomH

So exactly what they've been letting AtGames sell for years?

E.g. here.

Those are just emulators in a box and not especially great ones as they suffer, like many old Mega Drive emulators did, from audio issues because the author approximated the relationship between the Z80 and the 68000. But on the plus side, there's a model that comes in a nice handheld size, and accepts an SD card for additional games, which would be a lot more effort to reproduce using a Raspberry Pi.

Google accidentally reveals new swipe-happy Android UI

ThomH

Re: ..amazingly, one-quarter ... continues to run a version... released in 2014. @Peter2

If your device has no other connection with the outside world, it probably also isn't counted in the survey that yields the 25% statistic. I would dare imagine that what the survey really reveals is that 25% of devices from which they were able to detect traffic are running the four-year-old version of Android.

HTC Vive Pro virtually stripped. OK, we mean actually stripped. (It’s a VR headset, geddit?)

ThomH

Re: Top Failure is MS Windows 10.

To interject, I had an original Vive and a sufficiently-capable PC in my home, granted to me as part of my employment, for something like a year. Even that had the tendency to make me feel sick, and ditto for many of the other people that tried it — the tracking was incredible, the computer supplied supplied consistent 90Hz video, but it was still enough to make me nauseous within an hour.

Don't believe the hype; VR still isn't particularly compelling. That's why I left that job.

Donkey Wrong: Arcade legend Billy Mitchell booted from record books amid MAME row

ThomH

That would make me run like a coward.

It's April 2018 – and Patch Tuesday shows Windows security is still foiled by fiendish fonts

ThomH

By being a scriptable interactive vector animation package that stumbles unwittingly into being the de facto video player, then gets sucked into Adobe's orbit and is dragged kicking and screaming into being a full application platform.

So, a bluffer's guide to being Flash: get famous for some late tacked-on feature you didn't think was all that major, then try to distort yourself into something else again.

Gmail is secure. Netflix is secure. Together they're a phishing threat

ThomH

Re: 'why', I would assume it's from a zealous reading of RFC 2822; in its grammar a dot is defined as a separator but a separator has no defined lexical meaning for the local part of an address. A server can do whatever it wants — to the extent that 2822's predecessor, 822, received an official amendment to clarify that the local part should not be modified when forwarding messages. Prior to that it was valid for server A to remove or add dots as it felt fit, then pass that along to server B assuming it made no difference there either.

Modern life is rubbish – so why not take a trip down memory lane with Windows File Manager?

ThomH

Nowadays you can just run it in your browser: https://archive.org/details/win3_stock

Definitely don't use your browser's debugging tools, spot the big binary blob that just must be the machine image, download it, unzip it and use it with a local copy of DosBox rather than Archive.org's recompiled-for-JavaScript version. That would be illegal.

ThomH

Re: Still superior to Finder

Give it spring-loaded folders and then we can talk.

ThomH

Re: There used to be a time...

During that period the primary design constraints were the API. Nowadays the primary design constraint is the design committee, empowered to safeguard the corporate design language du jour.

2001 set the standard for the next 50 years of hard (and some soft) sci-fi

ThomH

Re: blade runner

I saw the newer Blade Runner on a plane, so I'm probably part of the problem, but I think it lived up to the original — it has the same central questions as to the value of life and of memories, but the same defect in descending into a series of action fight sequences as it progresses. It does so a million times better than superhero fluff as it all feels as though it has stakes and actual peril, but nevertheless it's an action crescendo.

In terms of how you wrap a movie up, I think I prefer 2001's late switch to wholesale awe.

ThomH

Slight correction: Blade Runner 2049 failed to recoup, with Ridley Scott's opinion being "It's slow. Long. Too long. I would have taken out half an hour.", as well as other versions of that with more swearing.

With a worldwide gross of almost $260m though, something just as long and good but cheaper could have been profitable. That's an awful lot of people still willing to watch a long film.

Planning on forking out for the new iPad? Better take darn good care of it

ThomH

Re: "Apple's 'education' iPad is still a case of won't – not can't – so we graded it accordingly"

I still don't see the logic. If it were not possible to build a repairable tablet, I'd want my tablet to get a zero repairability score since it cannot be repaired.

I don't really want my repairability scores to have an editorial stance, I just want to be able to make a value-for-money assessment.

ThomH

"Apple's 'education' iPad is still a case of won't – not can't – so we graded it accordingly"

I was under the impression that a repairability score was solely about the extent to which a thing can be repaired. An iPad should score a low number on that basis alone. Is there a need to start making value judgements about the company?

If there were an actual immutable physical reason why Apple had no choice but to sell a device that couldn't be repaired at all, would it get a high repairability score because it was a case of can't not won't?

I'm all for admitting that the iPad is not much of a repairable device, and that Apple's prioritisation partly explains that, but it's somewhat editorialising to suggest you deducted points from a repairability assessment because of the latter.

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

ThomH

Re: More likely is the end of macOS

Apple computers are disproportionately prominent in a few markets: publishing, video, photography, education.

Too many of the core Mac use cases would vanish if it became a glorified iPad, and thankfully with sales of the latter now well down from their peak, it has lost its waymarker sheen. Similarly, the Mac App Store is largely moribund.

I therefore strongly doubt that Apple would kill macOS, whether explicitly or only in effect.

ThomH

I have VMWare with a Linux image for ensuring my cross-platform open source project really is still cross-platform but in 12 years I've never once felt compelled to install Boot Camp. It's not really useful for anything besides gaming, and that's a niche interest in itself so gamers who buy Macs must be extremely negligible.

ThomH

Re: Makes a lot of sense @tiggity

Bit shift is endian-independent as its defined on the full logical word, not its in-memory representation; mistakes tend to manifest when talking about serialisation or any attempt at sub-word access. Also sometimes in latent misuses of or deliberate endian-assumptions within a union.

ThomH

Intel's would still be the longest-surviving Mac instruction set

The Mac was 68000-based for a decade from 1984 until 1994, then PowerPC-powered for the 12 years from 1994 until 2006, so by 2020 will have had Intel inside for 14 years.

Now that we all sit atop compilers and execution units are so far divorced from instruction sets, it feels difficult to get very emotional about it. If it were to happen, it'd be more interesting to find out what Apple would use the opportunity to eject from the legacy software stack. I think there's too much of the Objective-C runtime underlying Swift's optional dynamic dispatch, and it still has a substantial role in bridging to C++ but I'm sure other candidates would present themselves.

Apple iOS 11.3 adds health records for battery, people too

ThomH

Re: Steve Jobs handling battery issue?

Ummm, something something about having courage, like a li-on?

I'm not a funny person.

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

ThomH

Really? Uber decided just to do whatever it damn-well felt like?

... and for some reason has never had to learn about consequences?

The only thing that makes me sad about Uber's ongoing fall from grace is that Kalanick and his bros have probably already cashed out, and they don't seem to be the sort of people to be overly concerned by the blood now on their hands.

How a QR code can fool iOS 11's Camera app into opening evil.com rather than nice.co.uk

ThomH

Re: goto fail;

It's more a question of why Apple isn't using its system library for normalising URLs. I suspect that whomever wrote the camera application is on the same spectrum as those people that feel the need to write their own ad hoc date-handling libraries.