Posts by Peter Gordon
102 posts • joined Wednesday 22nd August 2007 14:00 GMT
Posted in Review: HP Slate 7 Android tablet
Re: Gazes over at Touchpad...
At least the touchpad had a differentiators, even at its original (admittedly ridiculously high) pricepoint, namely webOS and a really good inductive charging solution.
This is just a generic "me too" product.
Re: Its an interesting strategy
I'm well aware of how HP massively cocked it all up, but its not like webOS ever set the world alight before that.
(also posted from my beloved pre 3 :)
Its an interesting strategy
but it is also the same strategy that webOS used, and it didn't get them very far, even though webOS was (and, to me, still is) excellent.
A fire?
At Sea Parks?!
gimme a portrait slider
and I would probably be tempted to move on from my Pre 3.
certainly android, ios and windows phone have failed to tempt me away from webos so far.
Posted in The Oric-1 is 30
Ahh the Oric
I had one briefly before upgrading to a C64... its an interesting machine...
Many years later, I wrote an emulator for it entirely from scratch, just for something to do on my train journey to work...
http://code.google.com/p/oriculator
Posted in The best smartphones for Christmas
I wish Leo hadn't killed webOS...
I would be hankering after a Pre 4 by now :(
OH NO! DISNEY IS GOING TO RUIN STAR WARS!!!111
Oh wait.. Lucasfilm already ruined the crap out it. Never mind, carry on.
if I worked at hp
and they had a BYOD policy, I'd show up with my touchpad and Pre 3. That would probably be more embarrassing for them than competitors kit :)
Re: fresh water
Well, I don't think washing machine water counts as "fresh", but I think I was very lucky with my Pre 3.
it was turned on when it went in the machine, but when I removed it, I immediately yanked the battery before drying it out.
Hmmm
and I thought my HP Pre 3 did well to survive 10 minutes in a washing machine (although it is still fully functional).
I'm not going to put the Pre 3 through any further endurance tests to compare to the iPhone, though ;-)
I'm reading this on an HP Pre 3
and my Touchpad is android free. I'm following this with interest, but even I'm not convinced anything great will happen with my favourite mobile OS. I'd love to be proven wrong...
Posted in Panasonic Eluga DL1 waterproof Android
Bahh..
My HP Pre 3 surived a several minute ride in the washing machine.
Admittedly it had to be dried out before I turned it back on, and the screen has some blotches at the bottom (nothing too bad), but it still works!
I wouldn't recommend it, though ;-)
Posted in Mars has more water than thought
of course there is lots of water on mars
its used by that machine that arnie uses to create an atmosphere!
Wow... the playbook interface was a copy of webOS. Now they've copied even more from webOS, the sliding panes look just like enyo!
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Re: If only...
They would have gone out of business faster?
I'm not sure there was a market for it by then, the Amiga 500 was selling by the bucketload.
If they'd spent the combined budgets of C65 development, PC clone building, and Mehdi Ali's private jet fund on Amiga R&D to keep up with the competition, they might have had more of a chance...
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Re: The Atom was more a system 3
I'm not sure the "best machine ever made" would have socketed chips hanging upside down on the motherboard, working their way loose with every key press :)
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Re: Mattel Aquarius
perhaps the reason that it isn't mentioned much is because even the mattel engineers didn't think it was any good, internally joking that it was "the system for the seventies!" (it launched in 1983).
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
woohoo!
an excuse to link to the oric emulator I wrote from scratch (originally as something to do on my train journey to work :)
http://code.google.com/p/oriculator
Presumably all the electronics will come in kit form and you'll have to assemble them yourself.
I have a phone with almost identical specifications
Same chipset, same processor, same screen resolution, but mine has a real keyboard and a much better OS.
I love my HP Pre 3 ;-)
YOU ARE TEARING ME APART LISA!!!
Other rows that would be interesting in that table...
Playstation 3 (often used for clustering.. or was until they removed OtherOS)
HP Touchpad at firesale price (should be good bang for buck :)
Its such a shame that webOS failed
I just purchased a Pre 3, and I absolutely love it, an absolute joy to use. The fact that I find it so damn good just makes it that much sadder that it represents the end of an era.
Damn you, HP.
Nice move HP
I'm still not tempted to put Android on my Touchpad, though.
I reckon they should call it
"Moonunit Zappa"
Posted in George Lucas: 'No more Star Wars'
Too bad
he made those terrible, terrible prequals before quitting.
Posted in Polaroid develops Android camera combo
This!
I was thinking, why not go the whole hog and make it a slightly chunky phone.Official reg units please
We want that in Olympic swimming pools!
Posted in HMV faces the music after crap Christmas
If I were HMV...
I'd invest in creating a system that lets customers pick an album, burns the disc, prints a colour label onto the disc, and prints a jewel case label. They could even put together custom compilations from individual songs.
The end result would have to be better quality than someone at home with a typical inkjet and a lightscribe drive, but the savings over having to have CDs in stock would be huge, and it would have the advantage over online retail of going into a shop and coming out with the product, rather than waiting for the post.
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
Yes. Really.
All of the demos featured in the videos above run perfectly on stock, unmodified, unexpanded C64 computers with 1541 disk drives.
Posted in Dizzy: the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure
Ahh Dizzy...
I hated all the Dizzy games, but I loved Phil Rustons' parody games "Wibble World Giddy", "Giddy II: Hero in an Eggshell" and "Giddy 3".
The former two were on the Amiga, and the third was an MS-DOS game. I got the assembler sources of Giddy 3 from Phil a couple of years ago, re-wrote it all in C, and now its available for Windows, Mac, webOS, Nintendo Wii, AmigaOS 4.x and MorphOS here:
http://www.giddy3.co.uk
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
Urmm... what?
I had tapes near my C64 all the time without trouble.
Mind you, the SX-64 had a disk storage slot that erased the disks because it was right in the middle of a magnetic field...
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
And yet...
the BBC can't produce graphical effects and sounds anywhere near as good as the C64 demos I linked to in my previous comment.
Don't get me wrong, the BBC's expandability, operating system, and CPU speed were all excellent for the time, but the C64 gave you more bang for the buck.
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
The story of the ridiculously slow disk drive is quite interesting
The old disk drives for the Commodore PET used an IEEE parallel cable, the supplier of which went bust, and Commodore found it difficult to source them elsewhere, so when they developed the VIC-20, they decided to create a simple serial bus with cables that anyone could produce.
The VIC-20, like the PET before, had a 6522 VIA, which could shift in 8 serial bits independently of the CPU, and raise an IRQ to say that a byte was available. In theory this should lead to fast serial transfers with very little CPU overhead. Unfortunately, as all PET fans knew, the 6522 had a bug with this mode, but the VIC-20 team didn't know this, and didn't find out until the hardware was finalised and it would have been too expensive to fix properly, so the software was rewritten.
Instead of bits being read in automatically without CPU intervention, the disk software was rewritten to constantly poll for bits, requiring the entire attention of the CPU, and slowing down the whole thing by around 12 times!
When the C64 was being developed, the bug was fixed, and the drives could have been much, much faster, but backward compatibility with the VIC-20 disk drives was deemed too important (not necessarily a stupid decision; the disk drives cost as much as a whole computer, and if someone already had a VIC-20 with disk drive, being able to still use the drive is a big incentive to stick with Commodore when the time comes to upgrade).
The end result is that the C64 disk drive system was around 12 times slower than it needed to be, and significantly more CPU hogging.
Luckily, the 1541 disk drive was a 6502 computer system in its own right, and it is entirely possible to send a small turbo loader to the drive, and load your actual application at the full speed, and a lot of commercial software did this.
Later, people sold third party ROM chips (JiffyDOS) which you put into the drive and the C64, and enabled the full speed mode by default.
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
Also, if you're interested in computer history
this book is an excellent read:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-Bagnall/dp/0973864966/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325507806&sr=1-8
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
Sorry... messed up that last link
Use this one instead:
http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Commodore%2064&order=thumbup
Posted in The Commodore 64 is 30
some examples of what this 1982 vintage hardware can do
(all these run on unexpanded c64s)
Edge of Disgrace (parts 1 & 2):
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=yFdjWSaDlIo
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=0b4uGv-9xpw
Andropolis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLP-poYbfos
Deus Ex Machina:
http://capped.tv/crest_oxyron-deus_ex_machina
Many more here:
http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Commodore%2064&order=thumbed
In the spirit of Reg projects
named after classy ladies (PARIS, LOHAN), may I suggest:
Mowing Automatic Robot System Hack
(after Jodie Marsh)
Strangely
the statue looks more like Sir Clive Sinclair to me, at least in that photo!
Posted in Cops seek clues to $1.7m tablet snatch
Brightpoint offer much needed work
for lorry drivers suffering from a crippling fear of network cabling.
Posted in Rainbow Islands
I actually preferred Rainbow Islands to Bubble Bobble
Not that BB isn't great (I like it too), but I enjoyed Rainbow Islands much more.
Posted in Happy birthday, Apple QuickTime
Very interesting article.
I wonder if the Commodore team were working on CDXL at the same time or before Apple were working on QuickScan, or if Commodore were inspired by it.
After all, Commodores computers already came with awesome video chips in the 80s...
Surely poor people have to get around, even if they don't have a car?
Higher fuel taxes = more expensive petrol = more expensive to run busses = more expensive public transport.
All you naysayers are jumping the gun...
What if it has a hand crank on the side to charge up the cap? ;-)
