Posts by David Given 433 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2008
Can I also plug Steve Jackson's Sorcery! series of games, which have absolutely kick-arse mobile phone ports? Complete with the ability to rewind time if you think you made the wrong choice, so effectively emulating sticking multiple fingers into the book as impromptu bookmarks!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.inkle.sorcery1
There's an iThing port as well, somewhere. I believe it's also on Steam.
You've obviously never had to transfer large numbers of files on and off a phone! Removable storage is mainly useful because it's *removable* --- meaning, I can take the card out and stick it in a fast PC reader.
Yes, modern phones have adequate amounts of internal storage (although you can still quickly run out if you want to, e.g., load up with completely legitimate films for a long flight), but having removable storage adds so much more flexibility.
I just *bought* a ZIP drive --- three, actually, in order to be reasonably confident that I got a working one.
The parallel port interface plus the DOS driver at http://leute.server.de/peichl/palmzipe.htm (which I actually paid money for) allows me to use a ZIP drive as a pretty slow but completely functional hard drive for a *genuinely* interesting piece of hardware I have, a 13kg IBM PC Convertible laptop from 1986. It works pretty well, although I'd completely forgotten just how annoying old-school hard drive whine is.
A while back I decided I had too much useless stuff and had a big clear out. I regret it daily. So much irreplaceable, interesting old hardware, gone like leaves in the wind... Never again.
Regarding floppy drives: I am, for my sins, the Debian maintainer for ufiformat, the magic tool which you need to format disks in external floppy drives (no, fdformat doesn't work). And just to prove me real hardcore credentials, I have just built a floppy drive controller to allow me to read exotic disk formats, such as the weird-arse 256-bytes-per-sector GCR encoding used by Brother integrated word processors. Fun stuff.
...which has been tried for years, hasn't it? And has always fallen down due to error compounding in the integration process, where cumulative errors grow very quickly until after about forty-five seconds your guidance system thinks you're on Mars? (Disclaimer: if you are *actually* on Mars, it'll think you're on Earth.)
It sounds like the original press release used the word 'quantum' a lot. How would this help?
I know from bitter experience that never, ever, ever use any sound you actually like as a pager alert. You *will* learn to associate it with terror, panic, and being woken up at four in the morning. It doesn't matter how pleasant or innocuous it is; using it on a pager will ruin it for you --- even Rich Evans' laughter will lose its charm.
*No dooont... stooooppp... my sides are hurting...*
Psst! Don't tell anyone, but there's a Linux port of PowerShell! There's even a Debian repository:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/setup/installing-powershell-core-on-linux?view=powershell-6
Re Apple Macs and command lines: yes, that was precisely my experience. The first thing I looked for was the menu option to exit the GUI.
I'm particularly proud that after diligent searching, I *did* actually manage to find the CLI, by locating the interrupt key on the side of the machine; this dropped me into MacsBug, which was completely incomprehensible...
That DTP package would be Ami Pro, by Lotus. I used it a lot as a teenager; it was pretty good. Relatively nippy even on a ghastly old 286. GEM wasn't much more than a single-tasking shell and GUI toolkit, but it was clean and got out of the way and suited Ami Pro fine. (And was a huge step above the trainwreck which was native DOS GUI applications.)
Strangely I can barely find a mention of the GEM version on the interwebs. There are plenty of mentions of the forgettable Windows version which came out later, but nothing about the GEM version. I wonder if I can find a copy? I bet it'd run really well on a modern PC...
10 minutes? Pah! I just wrote a compiler which takes *17* minutes to compile a one-line 'Hello, World!' program, and I have the video to prove it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wLATW7sVXs
Admittedly, it is running on a BBC Micro. (See http://cowlark.com/cowgol/ for the main project page.)
I played with it a while back, while I was trying to evaluate compiles-to-machine-code languages which weren't Go. Nim's interesting; it's got a number of nice features, like having compile-time functions which have access to the AST, allowing really easy code generation (and hygienic macros).
But I couldn't make myself like it. I find the combination of Python-style significant whitespace _and_ C++ style bugsplatter punctuation nearly unbearable; and there are some mad, mad, mad design decisions --- the identifiers FOO_BAR and fooBar are equivalent...
This has been well known for years --- go look up 'quantum bododynamics' in the Hacker's Dictionary...
Brief summary: bogons are particles which cause technology to fail. Some people emit bogons, thus causing technological failure when they're nearby. Others absorb them, damping the level of ambient bogon radiation.
This is why the printer always works fine when the sysadmin is nearby; the sysadmin has been working in tech for so long that they've become a highly effective bogon sink.
I always wanted one of those, but was never able to find one. Eventually I got a second hand Razer gaming keyboard and wrote some chording keyboard software:
http://cowlark.com/narcissus/
Turns out that writing the software was much, *much* easier than learning how to actually type on the bloody thing.
Ian Bell had an officially unofficial rewrite of the trading engine in C:
http://www.elitehomepage.org/text/index.htm
...so if you feel like trying to write scripts for ultra-efficient trading routes in order to achieve galactic financial domination, this is for you.
You can also find the full text of the Elite novella, by noted fantasy author Robert Holdstock: http://www.elitehomepage.org/dkwheel.htm
And you can also find the as-yet-unpublished Elite musical: http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/musical/index.htm
You want a CAT S60.
https://www.gsmarena.com/cat_s60-7928.php
It's rather long in the tooth now, but it literally ticks all your checkboxes (except the modular charging port, but it is ruggedised and lives under a cover so it should last), plus it has a two-day battery, it's waterproof, you can run it over in your car, it looks completely bonkers and it has a built-in thermal imaging camera.
I saw someone with one the other day. Holy crap it looks good (mainly due to not being just another glass fondleslab).
CAT make newer phones (some of them quite reasonably priced, I should look into replacing my dying Nexus 5X), but they're boring by comparison.
***Breaking news!***
Turns out the CAT S61 has everything the S60 does, except the cool angular corners, but it also comes with a air quality sensor and a laser. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cell-phone-reviews/cat-s61-review/
YOU CAN GET A PHONE WITH A LASER IN IT.
That is all.
Dune2's been ported to Android, by the way, cutscenes and all. Sadly it's not on Google Play because... the dev seems to be a jerk... but it's still available as a sideload if you dare.
http://www.overclock.net/forum/82-video-games-general/1498738-did-anyone-play-dune-2-android-if-so-sorry.html
http://epicport.com/en/dune2/android
What was that old 'hologram' beat-em-up arcade game that did pretty much that?
It wasn't true 3D, of course; it used Pepper's Ghost, with the two players standing each side of a glass table looking down, to project the screen inside so that they saw their characters apparently standing on the surface of the table. The virtual screen always faced the player, so it looked weird as you walked around the table. (Both players saw the same screen.) And the screen was 2D, so your characters were flat.
But it was supposed to be incredibly convincing, nevertheless.
**Edit:** maybe Sega's Time Traveller? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fooFhfVUEI4 It's obviously similar technology, but I'm sure it's not the one I've seen.
Man, I miss those. I found myself wanting to look one up the other day and spent ages with the Reg's, um, great search engine...
Was there / will there ever be an edited collection of them, possibly with full colour photos and scratch-n-sniff previews, on paper? Because I might actually buy one.
As a very small geek I visited Dover sometime pre 1985, and I have photographic evidence to prove it:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByWQADzU1i2wX1JIX09SSVNsYTg/view?usp=sharing
I can't imagine anyone would have trusted me with a camera back then so the blurriness of the photo probably isn't my fault, but it still makes it impossible to make out the name or the registration in the front. It looks like the pictures of one of the SRN4 on WIkipedia.
What particular strikes me looking at the picture today is the way it's driving along the concrete apron with people randomly wandering about taking photos. Basic safety: we've heard of it...
I believe Banks was once accused (by a snobbish critic) of writing potboiler SF in order to fund his real literature.
He said, hell no. His 'real literature' sold vastly better than the SF. He said that one of the reasons he wrote in two distinct genres was that that let the 'real literature' subsidise the SF, which is what he really enjoyed doing...
It did start out with 800kg of fuel, mind, so right now the tank's at about 1.5%. They *are* running on the dregs (probably why they did the burn with the attitude thrusters rather than the main engine).
...it started out with a fully loaded mass of 1337 kg. Yes, this may be humanity's first spacecraft to rate Elite status.
Well, actually...
The Pi's boot process is like this:
- VC4 turn on.
- VC4 boot rom finds the SD card and loads the VC4 boot image (bootcode.bin).
- The VC4 boot image loads the VC4 OS kernel (start.elf).
- The VC4 OS does all its initialisation and startup.
- The VC4 OS finds and loads the ARM kernel image (kernel.img).
- The VC4 OS turns on the ARM core.
- Your OS boots.
The ARM isn't involved in *any* of the boot process! By the time it gets power, the kernel image is already in memory! The VideoCore IV is doing all the work.
It'd be totally feasible for the Pi Foundation to extend the VideoCore OS (I think it's ThreadX?) to support network boot. But you'd still need an SD card to load it, and I suspect that it doesn't have USB or ethernet drivers, so it'd be a lot of work, and it's closed source anyway.
I should just clarify: Mallard Basic was *nothing whatsoever* like BBC Basic. Mallard Basic was a Microsoft-basic like thing, with extra support for random access files and assorted businessy things. While BBC Basic had named procedures and (some) structured programming primitives, Mallard Basic was all about the GOSUBs.
Here's the manual: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/Plus3CPMManual/index.html
You *can* get BBC Basic for CP/M, and it's damn good too, even supporting the built in assembler (converted to the Z80, naturally): http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic/z80basic.html
(It's worth mentioning that the PCW's version of CP/M came with a full set of development tools out of the box. Not just Basic and Logo, but an assembler and linker. It probably even came with the CP/M porting kit.)
(I wrote my first adventure game on one of these: Escape From Planet Zorg, it was called. It was in Mallard Basic. I still remember the terrible piranha puzzle.)
Solar sails don't work anything like sailing with wind.
The sail's not going to lift anything against solar gravity, so the only part of your acceleration vector that's of particular interest is whether it's speeding up your orbit or slowing it down. If the former, you'll move outwards. If the latter, you'll move inwards.
There is a solar sail mod for KSP, if you want to play with one.
Don't forget that this is the *second* light sail mission --- and it's just a test-bed, at that (it's way too low to do anything other than burn up almost immediately). The *first* was JAXA's Ikaros. Launched five years ago alongside their Venus probe, it passed Venus after six months and is now... somewhere (and I haven't been able to find a reference). It was last contacted in April this year.
Ikaros is interesting because it's got LCD panels on the sail which allow the albedo to be changed; it's steerable. They reckon it's getting about 1 mN of thrust.
You did know that Microsoft used to make a Unix, right? It was called Interix, and ran alongside win32 as another personality on top of the Windows NT kernel. It interoperated with win32 seamlessly, so you could combine the win32 GUI with full Posix semantics with processes, sockets, hard and soft links, etc. It even came with gcc. It worked really rather well. It felt very much like an old-school Unix, so Korn shell, an old libc, non-ELF, etc. But it was so, so much nicer than Cygwin. For a while you could even install Debian packages on it.
Unfortunately it never got much maintenance and suffered from institutional rot. Despite being reinvented as Services For Unix, and then Subsystem for Unix Applications (gotta love those names), the last released version was for Windows 8.
More information here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779522(v=ws.10).aspx
Win8 download here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35512
(The actual Posix layer gets shipped in higher end Windowses by default; but you need to install the userland yourself before you can actually do anything with it.)
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