Posts by ThomH

Re: nope, Smalltalk80 was The Bomb..

> Anyone who uses MI really does not know what they are doing. Or writing toy code.

Or using pure abstract base classes as a surrogate for protocols.

Re: Wrong

I think the Richard M Stallmans of the world are very interested. And possibly curious developers, especially those in the bare metal niche.

But no, these are not substantial groups.

Re: Doing a Musk

To be clear, Adams' most direct comment was "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the f*** away. Wherever you have to go, just get away.", i.e. he advocated in favour of segregation, treating all black people and all white people as homogenous groups.

I don't need to know who agrees or disagrees with that to have a strongly negative opinion about it.

The ST was substantially cheaper for most of its lifespan; e.g. at launch in 1985 an 8Mhz 512kb Atari ST with a colour monitor (the more expensive option) was $1000, compared with $1,295 for a 7.14Mhz 256kb Amiga with no monitor. Leading to the ST being the world's first computer to offer 1mb for less than $1000.

Around 1990 when the difference was only about £100 it's not so important, admittedly.

Re: Ok... I have to ask

With the landfill Android factories pumping out devices that can be sold for $10, what would justify the effort of somebody designing a board without Wifi?

Indeed, it does rather suggest that it would be logically impossible to plead guilty to a dishonesty offence.

Re: Flawed logic

It'd be about as successful as iTunes Ping, while probably consuming more than the staff levels still assigned to macOS; if anything I'm surprised that Microsoft has clung on for so long.

Re: BIg Bang Theory

MASH is the worst to try to watch here in my US sojourn; a huge laugh track over almost everything. I'm pretty sure it showed in the UK without a laugh track.

Re: 64-bit port

Tediously: the 1984 Macintosh did file types and application associations as resource fork key/value pairs, allowing per-file associations and not putting any trace of the type into the file’s name. I doubt it was the first, and — to be overt — RISC OS was way ahead in uncountably many other areas.

Re: Falcon, ST, AmigaOS et al

> What that processor lacked, and what you’re maybe thinking of, was an MMU.

Most precisely, the stack frames it produces upon a bus error aren’t sufficient to know how complete an instruction was when it threw, and no support is offered for restarting a half-complete instruction.

So you can’t bolt on an MMU in a general-purpose fashion because any instruction that causes a page fault will have done an unknowable amount of its operation — and side effects — before throwing but can only be restarted from the beginning.

I’m on GitHub rather than Lab but to offer an example from further on the spectrum: amongst my set, I have one repository that is multiple gigabytes in size.

It’s test cases, in volume, spelt out in JSON as insurance against bit rot. That’s even with a decent portion of them being GZipped prior to addition to the repository.

It’s popular with a decent subset of people, but we’re talking dozens only. Would almost certainly fail an objective cost-benefit analysis.

Re: WSA or ASW?

Windows Subsystem for Android = an adaptation of Android that works on Windows.

Windows 11 = an adaptation of the number 11 that works on Windows.

Microsoft Office = the version of Microsoft written by Office.

“640kb ought to be enough for anybody” = an apocryphal claim that 640kb will be happy no matter who uses it.

Re: A million hours

Maybe they paired up with Tesla’s self-driving team?

Re: Macbook?

but the new Apple Silicon Macbooks are actually hostile to Linux and only support MacOS.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the Asahi Linux FAQ states:

Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development).

So I guess we're defining "actually hostile" to mean "won't help with the development", and "only support MacOS" to mean "Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels"?

Elsewhere from the FAQ, to get ahead of the topic:

Apple still controls the boot process and, for example, the firmware that runs on the Secure Enclave Processor. However, no modern device is “fully open” - no usable computer exists today with completely open software and hardware ...mainstream x86 platforms are arguably more intrusive because the proprietary UEFI firmware is allowed to steal the main CPU from the OS at any time via SMM interrupts, which is not the case on Apple Silicon Macs. This has real performance/stability implications; it’s not just a philosophical issue.

Re: C++ and memory safety

I managed one the other day by parallelising some unit tests, which are completely independent and were running without hiccup serially.

The reason, as I eventually discovered? One of the functions on the line declares a local variable that ends up being ~480kb; meanwhile the particular parallel for on my particular OS provides a much smaller stack to things dispatched in that manner.

In practice one of the threads was stomping on the memory area of the next before it had started up, so the actual crash occurred when a thread I don't own mysteriously appeared to start up with a single-item stack trace, being a crash inside an object with this = 0.

So, ummm, either I'm arguing that it is possible to hit subtle memory access bugs even with modern RAII code, or I'm revealing that I am a 'bad' programmer.

Re: Elon Musk told GQ, "The one time I met Steve Jobs, he was kind of a jerk."

Luckily I think it only takes six to know eight, so the chain attenuates.

Re: Mini is cancelled

The iPhone 13 Mini is still on sale, now at a reduced price, and with the same processor as the iPhone 14. You're to make do with only two-thirds as much RAM and a fractionally-worse camera though.

That said, the iPhones were at 4gb RAM for three years before this year's increase to 6gb so you should probably also be wary of that being the arbitrary cut-off for some version of iOS at some point.

Re: 'Take that, you evil Trump fan'

I was responding to the conversation as already digressed.

That said, if there’s one thing I thought the left was against then it’s undue power accumulating in private hands so for me it is a concern that Twitter, Facebook et al can go so far in deciding what propagates and what doesn’t, without any sort of oversight.

I don’t agree with you about the net bias, but that’s orthogonal.

Re: E=World

The Atari ST was 1985. The Apple II, the first home computer with colour graphics and sound, was 1977.

The Atari ST offered the first colour desktop GUI, the first < $1000 1mb machine and a bunch of other breakthroughs. Apple didn't offer a colour desktop until the IIgs in 1986, and didn't offer a decent colour desktop until the Mac II in 1987. It continued selling purely-monochrome machines at the entry level until the end of 1990.

Fun bonus observation: the Atari ST was designed by a team led by Shiraz Shivji, who had previously worked on the Commodore 64, another famous colour-and-audio machine.

But objectively, here in reality, whether you like the company or not: Apple was first with colour graphics and with audio.

[if you can forgive that both were painful, being artefact colour and software toggling of a speaker position]

Re: An ostensibly nonpartisan left-wing advocacy organization

In ye standard political aside: do you coincidentally mean more-or-less since the Reagan-era abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987?

Luckily for Apple the other broadly-similar employers such as Google, Meta, etc, are either reducing or completely freezing hiring in the short term.

I'm full remote these days, and I ideally wouldn't ever go back. It's doing wonders for my child time — both being with one and acting like one.

Re: "Email only recently (2008-ish?) came to mobile telephony"

Even before that there were WAP front-ends to email which somebody, somewhere, probably used once, at a rate of 38p/megabyte.

VMWare Fusion Player is also free for personal use, though you have to register first. It's my preferred choice.

I had a first-generation MacBook Pro with its Core Duo, and used it up until probably about 2010; it is unfortunate that Apple needed to jump ship during Intel's temporary regression to a 32-bit ISA but at least no Apple laptop ever saw a single-core x86. The original low-end Mac Mini was a Core Solo.

The PowerPC was so far behind at that point that I doubt Apple could have afforded to wait much longer, but at least SSE3 was present right out of the gate, providing a smooth transition for things like the Accelerate framework.

Re: Open source?

> In one final gasp, the Apple II supporters at Apple designed the Apple IIGS Plus, code named "Mark Twain". It had an 8Mhz 65C816, a built in SuperDrive, 2MB on the motherboard, and a hard drive. Prototypes leaked out and a user group that has one and wrote a series of articles about it. Apple management vetoed this unit.

The Mark Twain was designed in 1991, a full five years after the release and therefore likely six or more after the design of the original IIgs.

Nevertheless, per the only owner of one:

> Despite rumors that the Mark Twain is a speed demon, a standard 65C816-4 CPU running at 2.8 Mhz is found in the same physical location as it is on the other IIGS models.

Re: Staingate et al

Most Apple fans will receive completely reliable MacBooks, as the statistical failure rate is a tiny slither of the whole. But that doesn't mean that Apple isn't culpable for some of the flaws, as here, where the issue could clearly have been avoided.

Me personally? In twenty-ish years I've had a MacBook Pro with a GPU fault that happened late enough as not to really matter and a MacBook with a logic board that has failed twice, the first time after only about three years so during what should be a machine's normal lifetime.

That's a pretty high subjective failure rate, but I'm damned if I can find any objective statistics so there's no reason to believe me any more than any of those other commenters you refer to.

Re: The title is no longer required.

Probably skip the +3; the CPC can display real 8px/character 80-column text whereas for CP/M the Spectrum uses some weird 5- or 6-pixel-wide font, displaying only a portion of the width of the virtual 80-column display and jumping between the left and right portions of the screen ‘intelligently’.