Posts by deshepherd

Re: Elite

The main limitations of Elite wasn't just the 100kB floppy (actually, most people played the game off casettes) but that the BBC model B "only" had 32kB of memory (actually, that was huge at the time) shared between program and the mem for the display. The highest resolution "mode0" graphics (640 x 256 B&W only) wanted for the front view window used 20kB of this so with other overheads in the RAM left not enough space for the program .... so they progammed a timer to generate an interrupt as the display process got half way through the screen and on the fly reprogrammed the graphics controller to switch to mode5 (160x256 4 colours) to have a coloured control panel/scanner - and as this mode used 10kB for a full screen the combination used 15kB (10kB for half a mode0 screen and 5kB for half a mode5 screen) which enabled the program code to have an extra 5kB! (Its incredible to remember quite how small the RAM was back then ... and how wasteful modern programming is able to be as it can assume that a PC has 8+GB of RAM and TBs of SSD/HDD!)

Re: Sage

Think the same applies to all the major banks computing systems .... lots of decades old systems patched to add new features/cope with merging other banks after takeovers/etc which it seems only persist becuase of the very public examples of what happens when anyone tries to make any sigificant upgrade.

Re: My tuppence

"Who counts chip cycles nowadays?"

Well, us proicessor designers are sadly still obsessed by the number of cycles in a Dhrystone loop

Re: PDP-10, PDP-11

Went to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in October and opposite the PDP-11 exhibit I saw there was a Data General Nova and I suffered a wave of nostalgia (first computer I used - we had one at school) ... had to resist the strong temptation to play with the front panel switches - at one time I knew the bootstrap code form memory ... though the full trip down memory lane would need several shelves of fanfold paper tape needed to for a OS reintsall onto the amazing large (?5MB) Diablo disk drive

Re: Hmmmm...

Elite, Eliter, Elitest?

Re: Talking spiders in Rama sequels

Was thinking the same .... the spiders are mainly in the later books of the series where ACC was a co-author - Rendez-vous with Rama is a good read, next one is ok as well but series definitely tails off towards the end. I read the whole series after buying it as a bundle for my Kindle and towards the end it defintely felt like reading was a case of "I've started so I'll finish" ... I'm currently feeling much the same reading the last book in Game of Thrones ... with the added incentive that if I finish before book 6 comes out then maybe I won't feel "obliged" to read it.

Maybe time to revert to usenet and move discussions to alt.boaty.mcboatface.die.die.die

Re: Absurd(™)

Your comment is almost as absurd as the Lego catalog from a few years ago when they were majoring on Star Wars sets and it seemed almost every word (and all character names ... apart from, for some reason, Han Solo) were adorned by a ™ symbol. Left a big question as why uniquely it seemed LucasFilms had either chosen not to or more likely had been unable to trademark "Han Solo"

Re: If cycling power doesn't work...

As opposed to the Acorn Atom where the rule was take the back off and push all the chips back in - Atom was single board with keyboard on one side and all chips hanging from sockets underneath and could slowly work loose as you typed. The Atom also came as a "Build-yourself" kit and one of the computer mags at the time printed a set of helpful tips for people doing this which included "if you are finding it hard to push the chips into sockets try loosening the socket first with a pin" .... sadly some people rather overdid this - had no problems putting chips in sockets but when they finished and turned the board over they'd all fall out!

Re: Obligatory...

Law enforcement added that there were too many search results to investigate so, on advice from a retired cop in LA, they'd asked Google if they were feeling lucky

Re: I remember terminal emulators... the mother of all "thin clients"...

"and I remember terminals themselves ... :-p"

terminals - luxury - I remember teletypes (and front panel switches!)

Re: So why did it sell Motorola?

"Amusingly coincidental timing - my Motorola G (2nd gen, so at least one HW rev behind) got 6.0 update yesterday."

The real test is if you also start getting the monthly security updates.

Re: Good idea.

"I'm glad it wasn't just me. I got a nice shiny XB1 off the Missus and it took me about 90 mins to download the patches and fixes for the 2 games I'd asked for! "

Worsefor me ... my son's Xbox came with FIFA16 via download + XB1 upgrades + Battlefront upgrade and to cap it all we couldn't get wired network to work so had to revert to the marginal Wifi connection (which is why I switched it to powerline for the games console some time ago). Result was son + friends got bored of waiting and connected PS3 up again! Discovered later that a cheap ethernet switch that was on the part of our LAN that connects to the powerline part of the network had chosed Christmas day to die .... fortunately I had a spare available plus an excuse to upgrade that bit to gigabit!

> Well, I've only seen pictures of Windows 1.0 - So I feel young this morning.

I actually used (or tried to use) Windows 1 at work ... and remember the "novelty" of overlapping widnows in win2.

> I do remember having to replace DR-DOS 5 with MS-DOS 6 in order to try out Win 3.1.1

> while at college - and now I've made myself feel old again..

yes, also remember thinking I'd need to move from DRDOS6 to MSDOS if I wanted to use Win3 on my home machine ... but decided that due to this added cost I'd switch to OS/2 2.0 instead as "OS/2 was the future" (and to follow up someone else comment - I also have several stacks of 20+ floopies from, various versions of OS/2!).N.b. the DRDOS/Win3 incompatibility was the old-MS at its worst - refused to allow DR (as a rival) to have pre-release access to win3 and then used an undocumented response from some DOS command to cause it to crash on DRDOS - DR could fix this triviallty but couldn't report this until they were officially allowed to access win3 after launch - hence several weeks/months of "the new win3 looks great ... but not if you're running DRDOS" articles in the press.

Anywaym this means I'm definitely in the "feeling old" camp ... may even start reminiscing about loading bootstraps using front panel switches and stackes of fanfold paper tape if I'm not carefull!

Re: I'd have that

Glad I'm not the only person who immediately had nostaligic thoughts about the Airfix Saturn V ... I had two of them!

Re: Very interesting.

Open to the public? You mean people who have not sworn an oath not to kindle fire (hmm wonder if the Bodlean should send a trademark dispute to Amazon!) in the library - I expect the library in Alexandria did the same and look what happened there

Re: Kitten Kong?

That's because the BBC don't show repeats of "The Goodies" ... though, I think I heard Tim Brooke-Taylor saying once or twice that they are now available on DVDs (including the "infamous" Apartheight episode that was banned for rebroadcast in case it upset the South African authorities)

Polling card is effectively just a reminder of where you are meant to vote and also gives you a number which (a) may make it quicker for them to find you on the list at the polling stations and (b) will make the party reps outside happy if it helps them tick off another one of "their votes" from their canvass reports and avoid them going to knock on your door later to make sure they've got their vote out! The only official statement of whether you have a vote is the roll that they cross your name off in the polling station.

Re: Please, do explain

What photo? ... adblock is not just for ads!

Re: The Lads from Lagos...

... but their bank account has been frozen so can someone please send them their bank account details as they can send payment via your account plus they'll leave an extra $150k in your account as a thank you

Re: Some thoughts

> 3, Just put it back to the way it was before

or just addd www.theregister.co.uk/classic

Re: Word rejected by Collins' dictionary

> Parsons Green - I think that's allowed isn't it?

Not when you're in nip (remember the paralllel diagonals)

Re: Next time, Gadget, next time!

Landing a failure? As you say the scientist seem to have got what they wanted (seems that it was planned that they would have enough time on battery power to do the important science stuff) ... and if it had landed better and got solar power to charge the batteries we doubtless end up with the opportunity style articles along the lines of "lander only designed to work for 60 hours still working after 3 months"

Re: Great stuff.

Concorde at Yeovilton is one of the two preproduction prototypes and as such the "passengers" would be likely to be merely engineers hence no need for anything more than a primitive interior!

Re: No surprise here

Want to use the tube? I think back in the days of tickets then that would have had some comment about T&C's that applied. You probably have to tick a box to get an Oyster card but not sure how they do it in the brave new bonk to pay world!

Re: Eh?

Reminds me of one when I was in Germany I went to buy a train ticket and my attempt at German was clearly too good as I got a long question in German back. Turned out that it was asking if I was coming back that day (which was a Sunday) as if so I could get a

Sonnertagruktfahrkarten

The German space character shortage continues!

Re: firefox ESR updated too

Hadn't heard of ESR before so looked it up. Seems like they are about to switch the ESR base version from v24 to v31 so when main version gets to v33 the ESR version will switch to the new UI ... prepare to be assimilated!

Re: What's the big deal with charging every day?

Is charging every day really a deal breaker?

Depends how its done ... if you have to flick a rubber cover off a microUSB port and then plug in a connector (having remembered which way up to do it) etc then its a bit of a pain. If its just a matter of putting the device down on a wireless recharging pad overnight then its not. I've had a Nexus 5 since a few weeks after launch and I bought a Qi charging pad very quickly - sits by my bed and stick N5 on it each night and the full charge in the morning lasts me all the next day. I'm sure for a watch it will be simple to come up with a simple wireless charging device that you place the watch on every night. So in reality charging every day is probably not an issue - in reality if it last more than a day then its got to last almost indefinitely to avoid the unexpeted "out of power" events.

Re: Two way adapters

What- you don't get "I haven't touched it." Even if if you saw her with it?

I just get the oh-so-helpful "well, I haven't thrown it out so it will be in the house somewhere"

Re: Is it just me?

It is ever the case that the newest and biggest initially commands a premium price. There are those that just have to have it (or convince themselves that they do) and it is only after this market starts dying down that the price adjusts down to mass market levels.

Yes ... I bought a 16GB and then a 32GB uSD card at the point I felt they were "affordable" when they'd come down to the ~£30 mark since I felt I needed the extra space each time (alternatively since I couldn't be bothered to sort out what I could delete from my previous smaller uSD card!) but I did so knowing that a few months later that £30 uSD card would be ~£15 and some more months down the line it would be a £10 commodity item.