Gordonjcp

There's a lot of reasons it's a pity it dropped out of the EU, but one upside is that it gives us room to rejoin as a proper member, using the Euro, in Schengen, etc.

Or, maybe just Scotland and NI, and Wales and England can become independent.

A lot of it reminds me of the olden days of Sinclair ZX81s with 1kB of memory, of which roughly half was free once you drew on the screen and defined a few variables.

We used to write things like "LET A=COS PI" instead of "LET A=1", or "SIN PI" instead of 0, because keywords were represented as a single byte and numeric constants as five bytes so two keywords represented a useful saving of three bytes.

Back then it made a huge difference but now that modern computers have hundreds or even thousands of kilobytes of RAM free it's a bit pointless.

That doesn't really work in practice though.

I've seen the aftermath of a Renault Megane hitting a Ford Explorer, and it wasn't pretty. The Megane was a writeoff, with significant intrusion into the passenger area. The Explorer looked like it had been de-orbited rather than centre-punched by a small hatchback, with the bodywork in four pieces and parts scattered for about 100m. The occupants did not fare well, and indeed none of the small pieces of the occupants spread around fared well either.

> But a 30mph head-on collision with another vehicle will almost certainly kill you in one of these trucks.

A 30mph collision in the average American SUV will kill all the occupants too, because they have absolutely no safety features.

It's bonkers how many laws there are against perfectly ordinary and normal things like importing cars in the Land of the "Free".

In the UK you basically just need it to have some form of braking system and nothing likely to slice open or skewer pedestrians as you drive past, and be able to insure it.

Did you forget what the OP asked? Is anyone using Forth in production?

I very much doubt it.

If you're writing it in Forth, why bother having a C compiler?

I'm currently using equipment that's working perfectly well running on NiCads and solar panels that are only a little younger than I am. I expect in another 50 years they'll be a bit on the tired side, but it won't be my problem.

In which case, I'm sure you can give some examples.

Actually it's the "bottom 10%" that'll keep trying different stuff until they figure it out.

It's the "expert gamers" who skip tutorials and then get stuck and end up all frustrated and angry because the game doesn't work exactly like God Of Thing I Played Last Week.

Probably not. It turns out that it doesn't map to modern computer processors terribly well.

It's an amazing and elegant language, but anything that does register-to-register operations is always going to be faster than register-to-memory.

If I have to do it twice I stick it in a proper script, with some comments, so I remember what it all does next time I go to do it. I do this particularly for stuff like complex ffmpeg filter chains where I need to do a lot of stuff to a video file. By simply running the bash script, at some later date I can get it to remind me what it does, and suitably mangle the video file.

Then, later on, often weeks later, I use command history to scroll back through everything I've typed until I find something that looks vaguely like what I originally typed, or I don't find it and figure it all out from scratch again, having totally forgotten about the bash script I wrote.

I suspect this workflow is surprisingly common.

"Taxi service" would be more likely.

In the UK, it's illegal to encrypt for the purposes of obscuring communication. There was a lot of noise about G3RUH modems in the olden days when 9600bps packet was starting out, because they used a "scrambler" to whiten the spectrum of the data being sent, and people assumed that meant it was using a secret key to encrypt traffic.

I mean, in a sense it was - you're trying to make thing with long runs of patterns look as much like noise as possible, which is the goal of encryption - but in order for it to work as a modem both ends have to have the same "key" which was a very short LFSR that would pull into sync during the training burst.

In practice, at least in the UK, you can more-or-less do what you like as long as you're not making a nuisance of yourself. You literally cannot pay Ofcom to investigate anything on the amateur bands, although you might get a lot of grumbling from daft old bastards.

Yeah, but how many times do you see a one-liner that's in a nice little boxout, but there's a scrollbar and you need to slide it backwards and forwards to read the whole thing?

No, because then you'd have a short line of text that takes up a huge amount of space.

Your lines of text on the screen should never be much wider than your hand at arm's length, ever, for any reason. Not even if it's an example of a one-liner in bash - wrap that line to make it easier to read.

Don't believe me? Angrily click <reply> on this post to tell me what an idiot I am, start to type your reply, and then hold your hand up palm out at arm's length to the screen so it covers up the text box you're typing in.

How big is it?

Told you so, didn't I? And it looks *perfect*.

I wouldn't have thought so, since most DMR products are certified for use in the US by the FCC and include fairly strong encryption.

Also, do bear in mind that most people don't need to care what the FCC says, or stick to their rules. I'm currently operating equipment that quite thoroughly violates FCC rules, and there's not a thing anyone can do about it :-D

You still need to physically meet someone you trust to exchange keys, however you slice it.

What's wrong with it? If it gets as far as loading an OS you ought to be able to run the Forth disk. The big problem they have is sticking on filter calibration, because one or other of the 405x multiplexers fails.

Forums didn't have multiple HTML pages in the early 90s, they stuck everything into a database like they do now, and pulled it out with PHP3, or even Perl (the one I wrote was PHP-FI, then converted to PHP3, and is now entirely lost).

But OP mentioned doing all the "dynamic" stuff in the browser.

I know how static sites work, I run dozens of them for people.

I don't see how using WASM improves the situation any.

So taking a fairly simple forum that I run as an example, on every page load you'd pull down 100MB or so of database, and then query that down to just the one chunk of a few hundred bytes to display a post, in the browser?

Why is that supposed to be better?

I had a thing recently where someone was updating some entries on a system I look after, decided the changes hadn't applied properly, and clicked "Roll back" to put it back to its original state.

Whatever had gotten into it, it rolled back to 2009. It rolled everything back, including user accounts.

No-one who worked there in 2009 still worked there, so no-one had a valid password any more.

Fortunately it was easy enough to copy the last-but-one backup over the top and lose the day before's config updates, and cure its Flowers for Algernon state, but it was a pretty hairy afternoon.

Most likely a "ROM emulator" that would plug into the ROM socket on the board, replacing it with a few kB of static RAM that you can pop stuff into from a computer.

In the mid-90s I used an already pretty obsolete CP/M machine to drive one of those for developing Z80 embedded code. Although PCs were around - 386s and even early 486s if you had the money, they offered no real advantage because the editor, assembler, and linker only took about a second to load from floppy anyway.

Given how much time I spend looking at 80x25 terminals I wonder why I put up with 20-second boot times now, over 30 years later.

I live in a part of the world with sustained 140mph winds for about four weeks a year.

We manage to keep power and comms running.

Well, the naive way to do it would be to detect the onset of each beat by assuming it corresponds to kick drums on fours, and then speeding up or slowing down the track you're mixing into to correspond with it, timing it so the fours line up. This would be very easy to implement and over a longish crossfade (say a couple of bars) would be fairly convincing.

Using AI you could probably intuit the "pulse" of the music to find the first beat of the first bar of a measure, and sync tracks up so that they mix in a place that makes musical sense.

Ah, right, so while you and I don't care what numerical value in the enum EINVAL has, if I take that numerical value and stuff the binary into another OS then it means something totally different.

Right, it's not that it *isn't* a constant, it's that its not the *same* constant everywhere?

"If EINVAL is not a compile-time constant, four of the initializations above are not valid"

Wait, why isn't EINVAL a compile-time constant, shouldn't it just be an enum?

Maybe you need to get a more reliable internet provider, or switch to 4G.

"Lost" how?