Posts by ThomH 2913 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
A few years ago there was a chap selling reproduction ZX80 kits for home construction much like the original and I feel like they were about £100 or so; proportionally that makes this PET a steal.
Positive spin aside, I think the point is to use period-appropriate components, along with the custom-printed PCB, case and keyboard. So it's going to cost a bit compared to chucking an FPGA in a case and giving it a PS/2 socket.
Possibly this comment might have helped you earlier: the confusingly-named VMWare Fusion Player is free for personal use, and allows creation of Windows virtual machines up to and including Windows 10. Apart from the licensing differences if you weren't a personal user, all you lose over the paid version is VM encryption, cloning, fine virtual network customisation and, per the comparison page, remote vSphere host power control. Oh, and you'll have to register with an email address.
When my licence for Fusion didn't transfer to the latest version I switched to Fusion Player and, honestly, haven't noticed the difference.
It's a bit buried, but see here.
There's also always VirtualBox if you want to keep things completely free and open, but I've always found it to be less than spectacular at GPU translation.
Per the rule of "You are a waste of space", I've long ago dropped particularly-specific dates from mine. Nobody's ever going to say "Oh, you worked at BigCorp between June 2012 and April 2015? That's a shame, because we really wanted somebody who'd worked there from March 2012 to January 2015."
Assuming your two-month gap didn't cross a calendar year, that might do the trick?
The provisional learners permit apparently doesn't have a photo now, and definitely didn't thirty years ago. It's just a printed piece of paper. Here's one from 1991.
I've lived in three states during the last ten years; only one of them was able to print a photo card while I waited. The other two — one of which was New York — print them at some other location and send them through the post, giving you temporary paper credentials while you're in the DMV so that you can drive immediately.
The allegation is that Apple[/SIS] not only failed to remove the defendant's name from their records after adding it based on evidence that was obviously unreliable, but that failure led directly to his arrest and detention.
If there were no recourse for that, we'd be talking about a pretty awful justice system. If the facts stand up at trial I hope this guy gets millions.
But, to answer your question directly, in the Massachusetts filing the claimed causes are: defamation, malicious* prosecution, intentional and/or negligent misrepresentation, and negligence.
* assuming US law matches UK law, this just means something a bit like 'while aware that doing so was wrong'. It doesn't require ill will.
The disclosing security researcher said:
Really, nobody's going to actually find a nefarious use for this flaw in practical circumstances.
You said:
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Right.
I think he's available on Twitter if you really want to argue with him.
I clearly remember many commentards here swooning over how ... the M1 doesn't suffer from all of Intel's leakage and exfiltration problems. Because Amazing and Secure M1 is. Woo-Hoo!
This is neither a leakage nor an exfiltration problem (and it doesn't fit the other things I edited out either). I think the original researcher has been pretty thorough in his write-up:
So you're telling me I shouldn't worry?Yes.
What, really?
Really, nobody's going to actually find a nefarious use for this flaw in practical circumstances.
...
If this bug doesn't matter, why did you go through all the trouble of putting this site and the demo together?
Honestly, I just wanted to play Bad Apple!! over an M1 vulnerability. You have to admit that's kind of cool.
So playing the playground brands-as-tribes game isn't really valid here; it's leaping on a single idiotic error of Apple's and pretending that it's both idiotic and consequential. By luck it isn't. But nothing about this vulnerability makes Intel look good. Especially not in a world with AMD.
The same thing that happened to "Wow, Tom H is the coolest! He's the king of the world!" and all other statements that nobody has ever actually uttered.
Knowing one of the specific flaws in the M1 doesn't change the general parameters, any more than knowing one (or many) of the specific flaws in macOS.
On the Mac side of the fence things are inevitably more limited, but you can still turn caps lock into a useful key. Via System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Modifier Keys... you can set your physical caps lock key to act as any of caps lock, escape, control, option or command.
Setting caps lock to act as control is the first thing I do on any new Mac. Also if you're using an old PC keyboard, from the time before Windows keys, using that same dialogue to switch the other modifiers lets you keep the command button where it is intended to be.
Apple's iPad marketing slogan seems to get to the nub of this argument: "Your next computer is not a computer." So it's not a computer. But also it is. Problem solved.
Snark aside, I don't own an iPad other than a superannuated iPad 2 that acts as my iTunes/etc to Bluetooth bridge for the living room precisely because it can't do a whole bunch of general computing tasks. For me it's the uselessness for software development. But they run Photoshop and Office and probably 95% of the rest of what anybody else wants from a computer and in that regard are very different from consoles.
I could see more of an argument if this were just about iPhones but Apple's choice to try to turn the iPad into a professional work tool may have tipped the scales.
His bias is obvious, but I nevertheless think Apple is going to be on a losing wicket wherever the argument relies on web apps being just as good as native apps — besides nothing else because it begs the obvious question: why the about face in iPhone OS 2, to allow native apps, if the web apps that iPhone OS 1 supported already weren't at a disadvantage?
But in this case you'd want INTC, if it existed, as the arithmetic is unsigned. 0xffffffff + 7 is a negative plus a positive, so it doesn't set the overflow flag.
To be completely explicit: overflow indicates that you added two signed numbers and got a number of the wrong sign as a result. Such is the range of two's complement arithmetic, that can never occur if you add numbers of different signs. You can get overflow only if you add two negative numbers and the result is positive, or if you add two positive numbers and the result is negative.
Conversely, when adding two unsigned numbers such as here, the carry flag indicates that the true result is too large to fit into a single word.
My understanding was that the M1 can optionally provide similar cache coherency guarantees to the x86, making for one less emulation pitfall that Rosetta has to guard against.
That said, I can find no authoritative reference so it might all just be Internet hearsay.
The Windows Insider ARM build of Windows 10 that Parallels is advertising support for includes an x86-64 emulator for application code. So in theory you get all of the OS-level stuff running natively on the M1 (modulo virtualisation of the other hardware) and then x86 emulation only for the actual applications — and you get Microsoft's emulation for Windows applications rather than Apple's, which is likely to be better-supported for that task.
So the Parallels release mentioned in the story isn't necessarily a bad choice for running regular old Windows applications on an M1 Mac.
That said, I think I'm going to wait for VMWare. When I last tried Parallels — which was likely more than a decade ago, so apply a pinch of salt — it was heavily invested in the idea of a shared desktop running multiple flavours of application, to the extent of secreting various hidden folders around my Mac full of application stubs so that the Finder would have something to connect file associations to, e.g. so that I could double click a .docx on my desktop and have that cause Parallels to load and launch the Windows Microsoft Office and then open that file in it.
That's something that some people will be a huge fan of, but I want my virtual machines isolated and with a minimal footprint on my Mac. VMWare seems to do a better job of that.
The news story is about the controversy following Stallman's return to a board membership. NoneSuch's comment is that isolation is an inappropriate response to Stallman's actions. My comment is that denying someone board membership does not amount to isolation.
From that you get: "Straw man! Straw man!"?
I'm struggling to see it.
From the category of we've gained so much but lost so much: the graphics card in my family's 486 could be bumped up from the VGA default of 70Hz to 90Hz in Windows 3.1. I don't recall whether that meant settling for 640x480.
You might want to try something like that if flicker is a problem.
I think you might have started from a false premise; I'm only an application-level C++ developer, which admittedly gives me more leeway for not laughing, but always ensuring everything is initialised at the point of declaration is nowadays considered proper form. That's partly why class-member initialisers were added in C++11 (i.e. you can put the proper initial value for any class member directly at the point of declaration, instead of just making a mental note to try to remember to do so in the constructor).
Similarly, raw pointers are generally frowned upon, really being used only where you want to supply ephemeral access and want to retain the option of `nullptr`.
`std::shared_ptr` is the correct storage for anything that you might want to distribute a `std::weak_ptr` to. Though, yes, Boost adds `intrusive_ptr` for those that are concerned about the location of the reference count (i.e. it puts it in the object, for good locality).
Ugh, Symbian.
One font. GPU support left as an app-by-app problem prompting the browser with three fixed levels of zoom (and, again, rendering everything in the single Nokia font). Not POSIX compliant, weird branched dialect of C++ that looked very little like C++98, never mind having a hope of being pulled towards C++11 and subsequent. All coupled to hacked-on touch screen support.
On my Nokia N8, with no third-party software installed: three completely different kinds of text scroll area, two of them direct manipulation, one that involved dragging a scroll bar. Many, many built-in parts of the OS not yet adapted for a virtual keyboard — the process for navigating to a particular URL in the browser was this: (1) open context menu; (2) find URL entry and select it, this brings up a completely different screen with a box for typing the URL; (3) this screen isn't virtual keyboard aware, so tapping on the box brings up the full-screen keyboard. Enter your URL here and tap to enter it into the previous text box; (4) on the previous screen, tap to use what you just entered as the URL; (5) now, finally, you're returned to the browser to see your page load.
The week before the burning platforms memo I was at an official Nokia engineering event at which the sales pitch was for QtQuick, Nokia still owning Qt at the time and it being the intended isolation from Symbian's awfulness and the upward path to Maemo.
The person they'd invited — a third-party developer with a successful app — more or less presented as 'Symbian isn't that bad because with some intense coding I was able to recreate UITableView and Symbian is cool because I finally got to stick it to those designers by having the excuse of platform inability not to do most of what they wanted'. Not a convincing sales pitch.
I think the plan of killing Symbian and transitioning to Maemo via Qt was smart, it's just a shame that the unexpectedly-fast collapse of the market for feature phones in the wake of Android took away the opportunity to execute.
You've fallen for a bit more of Apple's myth-making there, in my opinion.
The Apple II started being head and shoulders ahead of its competition — the only one of the 1977 launches with bitmapped graphics, colour or sound — but quickly ran to ground. Woz's cool $0.015-saving hacks that so impressed all his engineering mates, added up through compound platform development to a system with paging logic like "this area will be ROM if RDCXROM or RDC8ROM is set; RDC8ROM is set if SLOTC3ROM was reset before an access to page C3 which was not followed by an access to CFFF". Multiply that sort or nonsense by the ten individually-pageable sections of memory, ranging in size from 512 bytes to 8kb, depending on which way the wind was blowing that morning.
As of the IIgs — a Woz-managed product — the official Apple documentation had formally labelled the-house-that-Woz-built as the quagmire state. Which is fairly polite.
Woz as a hardware engineer is like a software engineer who can write something small very quickly, then turns it in as a rats' nest of global variables and gotos, to save four cycles.
Compared to people like Jay Miner or Jim Westwood, the amount of praise Woz already gets is hugely disproportionate.
> Safari only matters because it's absolutely forced upon the many Apple customers. Want to use a different web browser on iPhone, iPad? Too bad. Safari on Windows was a massive failure.
That's the reason why Safari has 20% market share instead of some much smaller number — it was at around 4% share before iOS came out. So I contend it would still matter. Or, at last: either Firefox doesn't matter now, or Safari would matter anyway.
I think it failed on Windows through sheer arrogance. Doing the big launch with a version that deliberately chucked all of the Windows conventions out the window, even including the Windows font rasteriser, wasn't smart. Apple seemed to have the mindset that everyone who uses a PC secretly wishes for a Mac, which is empirically far from true.
Plus I seem to remember some sort of coercive behaviour around installer packages; I can't remember whether iTunes tried to force Safari on you, Safari tried to force QuickTime on you, or some other equally counterproductive combination, but Apple seemed determined to increase customer mistrust.
It's not a bad browser, indeed it's a pretty good one, but they basically all are. I know Edge is also. But I'm a Safari + Firefox guy, myself.
And there was no _need_ for Apple to give you Clang at all.
There's several reasons why GPLv3 and GPLv2 added together amounted to only 20% of open source development during 2020, but one of them is definitely avoiding the religious zealots and their narrow-minded black and white worldview.
GCC is the epitome, as per the article. Poorly architected, in a conscious attempt to lock people in.
Nerd attack!
To output graphics the ZX80 and ZX81 rely on the Z80 — it jumps to video memory and attempts to execute. The video logic (discrete or ULA, respectively) spots that based on the high bit of the address and from then on it pushes whatever opcode the CPU was going to fetch into a latch and forces a NOP to the CPU. It's a Z80 so it follows up the opcode fetch with a DRAM refresh cycle, during which the video logic forces the just fetched opcode plus a three-bit-counter on top of the low 9 bits of the refresh address and uses whatever comes back on the bus as the next 8 pixels of video output.
The internal RAM is static, so there's no actual refresh.
(and I've simplified that description a little by omitting HALT; there is some intelligence in there so that if the CPU reads a HALT then it actually gets a HALT, which is how the 1kb machines don't have to maintain a full 32x24 text buffer unless the user has actually filled the display with characters)
So, the two main options for high-res output are:
(1) find a suitable set of locations in ROM to cover a decent number of the possible range of pixel patterns, and use that as your target for the refresh cycles — on a Z80 you can set the top 9 bits of a refresh address, as DRAMs at the time had 7-bit address buses and therefore the Z80 increments across only the low 7 bits. This is how any high-resolution game you played that had odd graphics that weirdly gained or lost lumps as they moved worked.
(2) move the refresh address into RAM. Technically relies on a quirk of the bus, but works with the internal 1kb of RAM and with many expansion packs. But not all. And it's hard to get that much into the internal 1kb. So this approach is better in terms of fidelity, worse in terms of compatibility.
Source: I wrote an emulator, of the attempts-to-be-entirely-accurate variety.
Agreed entirely; in principle the ZX81 isn't that far advanced over the ZX80 — it's a larger ROM, an extra counter and some corresponding logic to trigger WAIT and NMI appropriately — but in practice it's a huge redesign, shrinking all the discrete logic down into a single ULA. The entire machine is four chips: ROM, RAM, ULA, CPU. For 1981 that's pretty spectacular.
... and then rolling that on into the Spectrum just a year later is amazing.
Belated: could you possibly be thinking somewhat more of Exile than Elite? Most of that map is procedurally generated, but a lot of the graphical building blocks — wall textures, for example — are just bits of the code, repurposed.
According to the authors, that's one of the reasons the Amiga conversion was so difficult. Sixteen times as much RAM, great, but it's a game with a large collection of assets, and at Amiga-quality graphics you're not going to find a set of program bytes that looks close enough to a wall.
Per Ian Bell himself, one can become deadly with 'only' 2,560 kills. Elite status requires more than double that — 6,400 kills. On the BBC original, all kills are equally weighted so that really does mean 6,400 kills.
That's a grind I never completed.
> I'd make it easier: why on earth was such an important decision with such a wide ranging impact on everything in the country left to a simple majority vote? This should have been a two-thirds majority from the start.
David Cameron, lacking the perspective to spot that he was a mere political flyweight and after winning other two constitutional referendums — Scottish independence and proportional representation —believed he could easily win a third.
That win being guaranteed, there was no need to do anything that might allow the xenophobia wing of his party to argue that he had tipped the scales.
I think the additional level of scrutiny applied to Apple in cases like this is just a direct consequence of its own claims, now and historically. When you actively boast about being good at something, it's valid that people pay more attention to your failures in that category.
That said, Doctor Syntax seems to hit the nail on the head. It's not 30,000 of all Macs, it's 30,000 of those Macs which run Malwarebytes AV. Which isn't likely a huge percentage of the total.
It’s a JavaScript API available to installers — once a user has downloaded and launched your installer, clicking through the appropriate permissions warnings, that API is available to you.
Including for misuse, apparently. This trojan appears to conceal files permanently in /tmp.
Kneejerk comments aside, this sounds like a trojan horse attack? If so then I'd rather that be a risk than have Apple go full-iOS on us and prevent users from downloading and running software.
As a real-life Mac user I've already looked up how I can check whether I have this malware, and checked. Nobody, anywhere in the whole of the world, seriously believes that Macs are invulnerable.
If your HP has had its motherboard replaced twice then it's exactly tied with my 2015 Retina Macbook.
No graphics issues with my M1 Mini so far, thankfully. It did suffer from the dodgy Bluetooth but that seems to have been resolved by a software patch somewhere along the way.
The funny thing is that I never had a problem with a Mac prior to the 2015 — indeed the 2011 model it replaced still runs fine*, as does the 2005 model that the 2011 replaced.
* well, I'm cheating a bit there. At one point I knocked it off a high shelf and discovered two days later that it had gained a massively swollen battery as a result. But luckily replacing the battery in that model is 'just' 15 screws and one connector. No glue, no prising. For an Apple computer of the last decade, that's as good as it gets.
I assumed he was referring to internal parts rather than to the UI (and to the wider open source community than to the kernel, Linux). And misusing the verb 'stolen' unless he's alleging that Apple has used open source code without redistributing it?
Those details aside, I guess:
Apple adopted CUPS after its Linux-world debut, but eventually hired the developer and bought the code. Though it's still also open source.
WebKit is famously a fork of KHTML, but is also open source and has itself been forked onwards.
Apple used to maintain various GCC patches but upstreamed as much as it could; it hired the creator of LLVM and has been very active in advancing that, whilst also originating Clang and providing that as open source.
Then I guess there's everything in the terminal that Apple ships, from zsh to ls to python to everything else — though what proportion of that is from BSD rather than GNU I wouldn't like to hazard a guess.
So, yeah, Apple has benefitted hugely from engaging with the open source world. I don't agree with 'stolen' as no licenses have been broken and important things have been contributed even where licensing doesn't require it, e.g. Clang.
But you can't imagine macOS being anything like it actually is if it weren't for the large pieces of open source software it contains.
I expect that some SJWs will down-vote this comment as they believe that everyone must avoid using words that their clique has decided are offensive and insist on pushing those memes much to the bemusement of others who were using them in a different context and had no intention of being rude about anyone.
It's not impossible, but most of the downvotes will be for your partisan virtue signalling.
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