* Posts by ThomH

2913 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

We sent a vulture to find the relaunched Atari box – and all he got was this lousy baseball cap

ThomH

Re: The real reason for the delay...

I guess it helped that the Vega+ people had a whole bunch of customers money to woo the production line company with. At least sort-of-Atari has declined to take anybody's money so far.

ThomH

Re: "It will do 4K video"

If we're playing this game, it also doesn't have independent storage for all 40 background pixels. It can store only 20 of them, plus a decision either to mirror them or repeat them. That's why so many games have symmetrical backgrounds. If you want 40 independent background pixels, you'll need to write to the storage as the raster runs.

ThomH

Re: Aaaahhhh come on....

Emulating the 2600 exactly is actually more hassle than you think; it predates such niceties as just being able to tell the video chip where to put a sprite: instead there is explicitly a 160-step counter that triggers a draw of the sprite upon overflow and a bunch of conditions affecting when it'll be clocked and when it won't. You can reset it manually or provide some input into clocking to shift the sprite left and right. But the timing-related edge cases add up very quickly. Most games you can fake, hence the ability to emulate most of them on a 486, but at least one* was successfully emulated only in the last couple of years.

Emulating something less simple but with a good abstraction is a lot computationally cheaper — something like a Spectrum, even allowing for contended timing.

* actually, it's only a prototype: Meltdown. A real back-in-the-day prototype, but nevertheless a title that didn't ship.

10 PRINT "ZX81 at 37" 20 GOTO 10

ThomH

Re: The best thing about the ZX81...

A quote that has inexplicably stuck with me from the Spectrum's manual: "Functions are practically indistinguishable from sausage machines but there is a difference: they work on numbers and strings instead of meat."

Just say that at your next job interview. Maybe skip the second clause for brevity.

ThomH

Re: There's still a ZX81 in our loft somewhere...

There's a 1980s Czechoslovakian port of Manic Miner to the ZX81; if you're thinking of that then I'm pretty sure it is one of those gets something very much like high-resolution graphics by using a part of the ROM that isn't the character set as the lookup table for the character set and making do with the best distribution of bytes it can find.

You could also get a genuine all-pixels-addressable mode by sneakily ensuring that nobody provided character set graphics at all, but it was hit or miss whether it would work with any given third-party RAM expansion and you don't get many pixels into the built-in 1kb.

ThomH

Re: I had a ZX80

The SAM Coupé is a "Spectrum with Prince of Persia on (and not much else)", and I loved mine dearly.

ThomH

Re: Nostalgia

Now do it on a ZX80 where each keypress is followed by a screen bounce as the CRT tries to resynchronise with a video signal that momentarily went missing. The ZX81's constant display is virtually space age!

Google Flutter hits beta: Another go at cross-platform mobile dev

ThomH

Flutter's doing entirely the wrong thing though in trying to mimic the native widgets. So it's neither native nor consciously unique — it's trying to look native without being so. Which is bound to go excellently!

Wearables are now a two-horse race and Google lost very badly

ThomH

Re: Why is Garmin

I'm also wearing a Garmin: I bought refurbished so for $150 that got me 8-day battery life, sports tracking with GPS and heart rate, and notifications from a paired phone. Plug it in via USB and all my data is accessible as XML (though in practice I just sync it with the Garmin app via Bluetooth). I didn't really want the notifications, but there they are.

That said, the first one failed after about ten months — the front screen came slightly loose without my noticing, water got in and that was that. Customer service replaced it for free though, with a brand new one so the net effect was: a free spare charging cable.

Trump buries H-1B visa applicants in paperwork

ThomH

@SmallBusinessUser

Don't know who you're calling an idiot, but there's a fixed, finite number of H-1Bs available each year. There's no infinite supply of anything, and they're just as valuable to the megacorps like Google, Facebook et al as to the dodgy Tatas and Infosyses. So quite limited indeed.

What's needed is to cut off the market by properly policing the local worker rule. Prosecute egregious companies like Disney that are openly breaking the rules.

Alas the probability of, well, any administration really doing something against big business is very limited. Especially the party du jour: blah blah blah Obama red tape regulation states' rights!

ThomH

There are a lot of anecdotal data points about the sweatshop end of the H-1B spectrum, but quite a few of us benefit from being at the flip side: real, legitimate employers want to ensure we get an H-1B so they take the reasonable salary requirement seriously and offer at or above the market average. H-1Bs are subject to a quota which is usually exhausted within the first few days of new availability each year, so you get only one shot at this. If you have a specific person you actually want to bring in, you don't take any chances.

If it were only the sweatshop kind of people, that'd lower the average. If it were only the specific offer kind of people, that'd raise the average.

I know a lot of people have an emotional answer about what they really, really believe is true on how that averages out, but I'd love to see some real data.

If I had to guess, I'd imagine that the overall H-1B average offer isn't as far below the market average as concentrating on the sweatshops would imply, and that the quota makes the total number of H-1Bs entering the pool each year have only a negligible effect. It's at most 65,000 people a year across all industries; there are believed to be at least 6.7m tech workers in the United States. Even if every single H-1B were for a tech job, would an influx of less than 1% each year really have much effect?

H-1Bs are time limited, so even if you assume that everybody stays for the totality of their visa, obtaining the maximum available extension, and that everybody who came in was a tech worker, that's still less than 6%.

Who wanted a future in which AI can copy your voice and say things you never uttered? Who?!

ThomH

Re: Not a single lawful one?!

David Bowie day on Spotify: all songs played as if covered by David Bowie.

Assuming there's also a Mark E Smith day-ah, I would subscribe immediately.

A print button? Mmkay. Let's explore WHY you need me to add that

ThomH

Re: Are there, really, any enjoyable applications of the five whys?

Pfft, Mandarin doesn't even have gendered pronouns, or verb tenses.

Though probably only because they spent all that time coming up with the tens of thousands of symbols used for writing, so had to skimp on conditional grammar.

Flight Simulator's DRM fighter nosedives into Chrome's cache

ThomH

These are Google's feelings: "We understand that many of you want a master password for your saved passwords in Google Chrome. ... Currently, the best method for protecting your saved passwords is to lock your computer whenever you step away from it, even for a short period of time. We encrypt your saved passwords on your hard disk. To access these passwords, someone would either need to log in as you or circumvent the encryption. ... Please know that your security is our highest priority, and our decision not to implement the master password feature is based on our belief that it creates a false sense of security instead of actually providing a strong security benefit."

Apparently 'malware is somehow present on your PC' doesn't count because one type of malware is a keylogger, and therefore giving all malware access to your Chrome passwords is acceptable.

ThomH

Re: Idiots...

I suspect that whomever was tasked with adding the thing to the installer was pretty vocal that it would not end up being a good thing, but a middle manager had overheard something that sounded similar in Starbucks and that was the end of that decision-making process.

Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election

ThomH

As above, the indictment doesn't allege that. As per the tweet, in the main article, trying to condense things down enough that you might actually read them: "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charge conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election".

The allegation is that these 13 committed crimes while seeking to influence the election.

There is no public allegation that they succeeded, or about where the money came from.

ThomH

I assume it's intended partly to dispel the arguments that there might have been no interference, that the source of interference can't be proven, or that any interference might not have been criminal.

Manafort and Gates' indictments were about those two people receiving payments from the Ukraine; both Flynn and Gates are still working on plea deals so we've no idea what they're actually admitting to yet; Papadopoulos admitted only making false statements to the FBI. So none of those directly allege any misdeed seeking to affect the outcome of the election, only personal enrichment and dishonesty about what may or may not have taken place.

ThomH

Re: Wonderful timing!

The allegation is that the 13 indicted committed fraud while seeking to influence the election: fake identities, stealing identities, etc.

They were discovered while investigating potential foreign influence in an election, but are indicted for fraud.

I don't think anybody seriously believes the US has never meddled in a foreign election; the most positive thing I can think of to say about them is that it's been a while since they actively overthrew a foreign government.

That being said, talking about an entirely different crime, if country X discovered a foreign spy, you wouldn't expect it to restrain from acting just because it also has spies.

Stephen Elop and the fall of Nokia revisited

ThomH

Re: Today you'd have to go into the Chinese countryside to find a bad Android.

I spent about six months using a Nokia Lumia 635; I purchased it in 2014 on some sort of promotion for around $50 rather than the equivalently-discounted Androids because the crapware AT&T were preloading made the Androids a lot less attractive. Microsoft always required that anything installed by a third party be removable and that the official software remain available. So instead of the AT&T-brand browser, file storage, music player, etc, being on my phone *instead* of Google's, they were there *as well as* Microsoft's.

And they weren't there for long.

It was a pretty good handset for ordinary phone tasks; the camera was obviously a couple of years behind but that's about all that was obviously slightly backwards. It probably helps that I'm not much of an app user nowadays.

So I'd agree with the idea that Windows Phones were better value, not that long ago.

Roses are red, revenge is so sweet. Microsoft extracts a few quid from Corel Office Suite

ThomH

Still unclear on the Ribbon hatred

Set it to automatically hide and it's just a pull-down menu that's wide rather than tall and which attempts better to engage your spatial instincts. It's like an alternate history version of what happened next after the '80s-Mac-esque pattern of putting everything into pull-downs got too overloaded.

That being the case, it astounds me that Microsoft even wants to expend the energy to protect the idea, especially when its Office suite is not exactly at risk. It's a refinement at best, and the desire for a better overall Windows experience should outweigh protection for a single dominant product. Especially when you consider the message this sends.

Who wants dynamic dancing animations and code in their emails? Everyone! says Google

ThomH

Re: how to turn that shit off @JetSetJim

Had I been given that tip earlier, my life might be entirely different. I find AMP to be such a usability nightmare that I switched to Bing. No, really.

ASA tells Poundland and its teabagging elf: Enough with the smutty social ninja sh*t

ThomH

What amazes me here is that Poundland should have come out of this campaign looking bad for just not being funny. Instead they've come out ahead due to the contrast with proclaimers of moral outrage.

Adobe: Two critical Flash security bugs fixed for the price of one

ThomH

Re: Philosophical question

If the original Flash was an intricate 1/200 scale papier mache model of Xanadu and each patch is a piece of masking tape cut just large enough to cover a dent or crack, Flash is now a perfect sphere approximately the size of Europe.

Assange fails to make skipped bail arrest warrant vanish

ThomH

Re: He skipped

With perfect hindsight, I guess the smartest thing would have been to turn himself in at the Swedish embassy before being arrested by the British police. Sweden doesn't extradite for political offences, or for offences relating to political offences. I guess he was paranoid about what could happen to him in transit.

ThomH

Re: Ugh

Unfortunately the police presence outside the embassy almost certainly costs more than incarceration would.

ThomH

Re: He needs to show that he had reasonable cause to jump bail

If he wants to negate the arrest warrant issued for him under Section 6 of the Bail Act 1976, then yes he does.

ThomH

Re: A Flagrant Rotten Denial of Justice and a Blot in the UKGBNI Landscape

He was named in a European Arrest Warrant. He was duly arrested, and bailed. He skipped bail. Skipping bail is a crime. He doesn't dispute any of those facts.

The underlying prosecution in Sweden has been paused as not a meaningful use of time while he's hiding away in his little cupboard. It hasn't been withdrawn or hit any sort of statute of limitations.

So no disputed facts have been withdrawn at any level, and he doesn't dispute having committed a crime.

Crowdfunding refund judgment doesn't quite open the floodgates

ThomH

I think you could argue that KickStarter is more than that because it requires a working prototype to be demonstrated, as a vetting service it extends. It therefore voluntarily assumes some sort of duty. Clearly a huge distance less than a shop, but not nothing.

In this case though, it sounds like the judge considered the contractual terms to flow from the advertisement that RCL sent to previous backers, and the wording of their response once money had been handed over. So, yeah, IndieGogo's relevant participation was just as the advertising platform — the details of this purchaser were known to RCL from a previous campaign and an ordinary contract of sale was established between the two. All the IndieGogo terms did is make it explicit that calling something a 'perk' doesn't obviate the intention to form an enforceable relationship.

Crowdfunding small print binned as Retro Computers Ltd loses court refund action

ThomH

As well as a Series 3a in a drawer somewhere, I've got a Spectrum Next coming, because I'll really, really, I absolutely promise myself, use it as a practical FPGA board in order to learn an extra skill. Honest. It's not just for games.

Google can't innovate anymore, exiting programmer laments

ThomH

I was asked once while job hunting in Silicon Valley whether I wanted to help to disrupt the healthcare system. Naturally I alerted Homeland Security immediately.

H-1B visa hopefuls, green card holders are feeling the wrath of 'America first' Trump

ThomH

Re: i am wondering about unintended consequences

>> >In America the size of the country allows everybody to find somebody conveniently distant from them to look down upon if they desire.

>

> As opposed to the comparatively tiny UK, where Northerners, Southerners, the Welsh, the Scots, and bless em, lil Norn and Southern Ireland all live in a warm ambrosia of blissful harmony.

The difference is the distance. A northerner can not only decide that everybody from a southern state is clinging to a bible and/or a gun, but also quite possibly never actually meet one.

I don't recall living anywhere in the UK where I did not meet at least one northerner, southerner, Welshman, Scotsman, etc. I think that's partly why the culture splits tend to be along class and wealth lines more than geographic ones.

ThomH

Re: Go Trump Go.

That just proves that there are abuses of the system. For Trump to be right you need to establish that the abuses outweigh the benefits, not merely that they exist. I guarantee you that there will be abuse of absolutely any system.

Sadly, since politicians with different views aren't presently willing even to talk to one another, it's unlikely that such a calculation will be made. Looking principled on TV in front of your party colours is very important.

ThomH

Re: In-Person interviews

Even within the United States, where I have been for half a decade, health tests were necessary.

That being said, they still have TB here surprisingly often. A friend of mine qualified as a teacher over in California, and as part of taking your first job they send everybody for a tuberculosis test. So they all sit in an office together for a few of hours or so while wheels grind. Good news: she didn't have TB. Bad news: she'd just been required to sit in a room for a few hours with at least three people who did...

ThomH

Re: i am wondering about unintended consequences

In America the size of the country allows everybody to find somebody conveniently distant from them to look down upon if they desire.

Those who live on the coast look down on the centre-state dwellers as unsophisticated and inflexible. Those who live in the middle deride the coast people as superficial and unprincipled. The northerners think the southerners to be time wasting racist yahoos, the southerners think the northeners to be uptight and possessed of a misplaced superiority complex.

Etc. Etc.

ThomH

I had my interview last week, but I abandoned my employment-based application in favour of one sponsored by my naturalised wife; if you're trying to detect phoney marriages then even a cursory interview is a better idea than no interview at all.

Given that we turned up with all the proper paperwork and good documentary evidence of intertwined finances, living arrangements, etc, in the event it was mostly trivia questions about each other, amicably put. Then a few minutes on British television while the interviewing agent processed his paperwork. A very relaxed environment.

Having watched my field office's processing dates slowly slip over the year since I filed, I can easily believe that people are being moved around or are spending more time on things than they were: the interview was a month later than my lawyer's most pessimistic estimate at the time of filing, and four months later than her most optimistic. Which sadly means absolutely no way I can be a citizen in time for the 2020 election — at the theoretical speediest a green card by marriage takes three years to convert to citizenship, which is already too late, and there are two further processing queues to proceed through that I dare imagine will add further delay.

Ironically, the main benefit of becoming a citizen of the United States would be that we could move back to Europe. Otherwise we'll find ourselves in a spooky perpetual twilight where access to the US, which is now her only country of citizenship, is in theory always available to me, but subject to the same arbitrary bureaucracy but without the advantage of presence.

29 MEEELLION iPhone Xs flogged... only to be end-of-life'd by summer?

ThomH

Re: I always thought the X would be one and done

I think whether this year's X replacement is priced the same or not will depend on whether the higher price has proven more profitable. A consolidation is likely though, if not a complete flush of the product line supposing they port the X's form factor to an LCD handset for the new mid-tier, sweeping away the 6s, 7 and 8.

A full[-ish]-face SE-sized handset at the 'low' end would be a very appealing device for me. Maybe next year? My 6s is still fine until then.

In Soviet California, pedestrian hits you! Bloke throws himself in front of self-driving car

ThomH

Re: You May Be Entitled To Compensation

If you go to Fisherman's Wharf, you deserve everything you get.

Cortana. Whatever happened to world domination?

ThomH

Re: Microsoft has an identity crisis.

Speaking anecdotally, the problem with the Kinect was: it isn't fun. Every title I played pretty much controlled itself while I attempted vainly to impart some sort of input. I'm not a fan of the franchise so perhaps that colours my judgement, but the Star Wars XBox 360 pack-in was the worst that I tried. It had a racing segment in which I discovered that as long as I held my arms in front of me, the vehicle would successfully complete a lap. Turning them sometimes made a difference, sometimes didn't.

So it was very similar to the Youtube experience of watching somebody else play a game, except that I wasn't allowed to sit down.

UK exam chiefs: About the compsci coursework you've been working on. It means diddly-squat

ThomH

Re: So it all hinges on exams

My most recent round of job hunting involved several trips to HackerRank and equivalent sites — timed coding tests (in C++ for my roles) in an in-browser development environment. You're scored automatically based on passing or failing unit tests, some of which involve timing constraints, but then the better interviewers will examine your code and require that you defend it.

I thought it was all a fairly rational way to proceed: it probably gets as close as anything to the amount of useful information you can acquire about a candidate during the period of an interview process.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

ThomH

Re: Hmmm...

So this puts us more or less to where a true microkernel would be in terms of performance? Virtually a full context switch cost for any trip into the kernel?

A breathtaking error if I've understood it. In a fair market this should kick the door down for AMD.

That was fast... unlike old iPhones: Apple sued for slowing down mobes

ThomH

Re: "To provide a better experience to customers"

It's a good idea to limit the processing speed if failing to do so is liable to cause the phone to shut down. Slower overall processing beats no processing.

It is a terrible idea to do that without telling the consumer and, when the consumer comes to one of your shops to diagnose their slower phone, not tell them that they can just spend X on a new battery, instead recommending that they spend ~10X on a new phone.

I feel like what Apple did on a technical level is correct; what Apple did in terms of communication and sales is a pretty terrible thing. It's easy to believe that a lot of people will have given Apple money that they would not have, had Apple provided the missing information. Which feels like valid grounds for a lawsuit to me.

How's this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini

ThomH

Re: Dvorak keyboard @harmjschoonhoven

I think you've fallen for a common piece of propaganda; the Navy has no record of the trial, and Reason magazine (though, warning: libertarians, so with their own bias towards proving that markets work) sought a copy they managed to obtain it only from an organisation called Dvorak International and noted that:

(i) it has no listed authors;

(ii) it discards out of hand two prior studies that seemed to have the opposite outcome;

(iii) does not fairly compare the QWERTY and Dvorak results it contains, picking alternative summarisations for each that produce better numbers for the latter;

(iv) the Australian Post Office test of Dvorak, which is much better documented, found no improvement;

(v) the Navy experiment was conducted by: Dvorak himself (!); and

(vi) when the study was repeated after the war by the General Services Administration, they got exactly the opposite result: QWERTY was the better layout.

So they concluded that the idea that a worse standard defeated a better one here seems to be a myth. I can see why Dvorak should be better, with most of ETAOIN SHRDLU on the home row (though I don't know what 'L' did to suffer its banishment to the far corner of the keyboard), but it sounds like the empirical evidence might be a myth.

Windows 10 Hello face recognition can be fooled with photos

ThomH

No, it's worse than FaceID because no matter how fantastic of a job Microsoft does, some PC manufacturer will save $0.10 by putting the cheapest piece of garbage camera in that their supplier happens to have a warehouse full of.

That's why nobody has yet managed to fool FaceID with a mere photograph, whereas as per this very article people are able to fool Windows 10 Hello with a mere photograph everywhere that a "[whatever brand] USB IR camera ... could not be used with the more secure face recognition settings".

Peak smartphone? iPhone X flunks 'supercycle' hopes

ThomH

6s owner, not at all motivated to upgrade

My assessment of new features runs all the way from things I don't care about at all (i.e. anything to do with the front camera) to things I care insufficiently enough about to justify spending money (e.g. the larger, higher-density screen).

When this one dies it'll probably be another iPhone but none since the iPhone 4 has felt like a big step forward.

Murdoch's Fox empire is set to become a literal Mickey Mouse outfit

ThomH

The Finally-Freed-From-The-Tyranny-Of-Its Director's Cut?

Former ZX Spectrum reboot project man departs

ThomH

El Reg previously estimated only 10,500 sold of the original Vega, of which this hypothetical device would be the follow-up were it ever to ship.

The original was a bit of a weird machine, being an awkward uncomfortable joypad with a bad direction pad and just four of the Spectrum's original keys, to use the software for a machine that originally had a full(-ish) keyboard and no joystick port whatsoever. So as popular as the Spectrum may have been, it doesn't seem like turning a profit on a remake is all that easy.

I've taken a punt on a Spectrum Next, which is an FPGA in a Spectrum-esque keyboard enclosure that comes configured as a Spectrum by default, but probably I've tricked myself into believing that it will have educational value but will just use it for a few games before forgetting about it. Which is one of the classic Spectrum use cases.

ThomH

This story lacks credibility. Nobody, ever, got a Microdrive to work reliably.

ThomH

I had previously assumed incompetence, but I'm starting to tend towards malice

As per El Reg's linked article "[the Vega+] came about in part because sales of the original Vega were lower than forecast and had left RCL with debts to clear", to which you add the various legal costs and the company is claiming still to have the crowd-funded capital ready for the any-day-now production run? And twenty-two months after collecting it, ostensibly to take a product they already had and combine it with an LCD screen? While AtGames seems to manage to push out new versions of the equivalent packaging of the Atari 2600 and Mega Drive every year without fail? All while a decent proportion of the proceeds of the original device promised to Great Ormond Street seems to have gone missing somewhere?

I'd be surprised if they even have the capital left to grab a Shenzhen generic and throw whatever MIT or BSD-licensed Spectrum emulator they can find on GitHub onto the thing.

No one saw it coming: Rubin's Essential phone considered anything but

ThomH

Suggests that phones aren't as commoditised as we tend to believe? Or more commoditised?

To me this looks like a decent-enough entry at its original price if I were looking at that end of the market, and a really good candidate after the price cuts. Yet it didn't sell. So maybe specific brands still matter?

They're also available unlocked from Amazon but I doubt that the Sprint tie-up helps at all — that's also the network that helped to kill the Palm Pre — maybe it's more that consumers care so little about which phone they have that they'll take whatever the network offers them?