Posts by Frank Leonhardt

Not about the modems

We all had modems at the time Demon started. Cliff's idea was to use them to provide direct IP connections to the public. But although I had dealings with Demon for the provision of a leased line (64k!), I remember Cliff as the local Apricot dealer from before then. He went through a phase of needing old Apricot Xis etc for some reason, and for some reason I had a load of them in my shed. He'd turn up from time to time with a load of cash and fill the boot of his BMW (? - Simon will know!).

I liked him, and wish I'd kept in touch as we were decades overdue for a reminisce. Sad news indeed.

Wot chip shortage? I'm calling BS.

We've all seen the mass media going on about a chip shortage - or "crisis" as everything seems to be called these days. Silicon chips are unobtainable, apparently. And industry leaders are blaming their inability to meet demand for products on the "chip shortage". But does this mean we should believe them?

Industry leaders are brilliant at blaming their mistakes on outside factors. Chips, and IT in general, is an obvious scapegoat.

It's important to differentiate between a "chip shortage" and demand outstripping supply for particular ICs. Cryptocurrency mining is soaking up GPUs like there's no tomorrow, so you could say there's a GPU supply crisis. The the boyz will have to make do with plain old HD murder simulators for a while.

The automotive sector always had an interesting supply chain. They beat the price down to the last penny and order "just enough" semiconductors meet their anticipated demand - if they guess wrong then it's on them.

And then there are the usual "flood/fire/zombie invasion" stories on silicon foundries that accompany every supply crisis. I'm not having it.

The facts (remember "facts" from the old days?) tell a different story when you look at the units shipped. Okay, this lumps in NVidia GPUs with 741 op-amps but it still paints a picture.

2019 976bn units shipped

2020 1002bn units shipped

2021 1135bn units shipped

So, if there's a semiconductor supply crisis, please tell me which semiconductors are actually out of stock?

Sounds like Ryan Air TBH.

Sorry to say the library picture used here is upsetting to anyone who's lost a friend or relative in such circumstances. If the victim was shown to be alive (e.g. looking up and rubbing head) that would have been better.

I've actually tried one out...

Back in 1992 I was at the press launch of Virtuality, (at the Hard Rock Cafe in Covent Garden IIRC). I wasn't impressed, but could see the potential. Last week I tried a Rift. It really worked. It gave me vertigo, and I don't normally suffer from it.

Yes, it's over-priced, but its time is coming. I've been waiting since 1992, so I think I know what I'm talking about here. Would I buy one? Well, I probably wouldn't buy anything from THAT company, but as the display system for a flight simulator (not the game time), I can see the potential. It costs me between £100-£250 an hour to keep current in a real aircraft, so a virtual one costing a couple of a thousand makes sense. There are commercial uses for the technology outside games. And what I saw was "good enough".

My first Apple PC was around £2K in 1981 IIRC, when £2K was a lot of money. If something has a tangible use, it will sell. And the price will drop to the mass market over time. My first mobile phone was a similar price in 1987 - but cheaper than having an office and a receptionist.

PET/Apple/Tandy were steamrollered as cheap home computers turned up in the 1980's (Apple's survival was very much in doubt for a long time). Oculus Rift will, in my view, create the market as earlier PCs did. Whether it holds it when it's matured, given its current attitude, is a completely different question.

The analysis that SSD may save them is probably wrong.

The drop in demand for consumer Winchester drives isn't about at switch to SSD. Punters are moving away from PC's containing drives, period. So a drive manufacturer having a SSD products isn't really going to help.

An SSD is a fudge - it gives Flash ROM an IDE interface, so it's plug-and-play with MS-DOS and Windoze. IDE was also a fudge to make poor-man's SCSI look like an ST506.

If the OS supports Flash AS Flash for backing store, packaging it up to look like a discrete IDE-compatible drive is a waste of time. If WDC hopes to survive by doing this, they're going to be out-of-luck - manufacturers will start buying their flash in the same format they buy their RAM.

That said, as a tech writer I learnt very quickly that predicting the demise of the winchester was risky. They've seen off bubble memory, serial ROM, wafer scale integration... When it comes to $/Mb (or Gb/Tb), they're always ahead.

Exploiting this vulnerability is not trivial, as suggested

Taking advantage of this flaw was supposed to be difficult, with ASLR making it very difficult to deliver a viable payload. However, ASLR was added with 5.0, so is NBG with older devices (and "old" isn't referring to ancient). Any anyway, this is no longer the case since North-bit demonstrated a proof of concept:

http://blog.frankleonhardt.com/2016/android-stagefright-bug-gets-serious/

Not revolutionary at all.

I didn't see anything revolutionary about the Microdrive, and I don't think anyone else in the comptuer world did at the time. There were several similar products on the market years before the ZX-80 even existed - such as the Exetron Stringy Floppy. Sinclair didn't invent the printer either; the ZX Printer was a very small, low cost and completely rubbish version of what came before. They did the same with the Microdrive; small, cheap and rubbish yet it seems to have aquired mythical status with those of a certain age. Other tape loop drives worked really well, but by about 1981 they lost any price advantage they once had to cheaper, smaller (5.25") and higher capacity floppy disk units, and the access times of tape loop could not complete.

Homeopathy anyone?

There are far more homoeopathic spells<<<<<< remedies on eBay than there are curses, and as homoeopathy is scientifically proven to be just as effective as witchcraft methinks eBay needs to think about double standards.