You may both be thinking of the ZX80 or ZX81, which used this hack to drive the screen. The ZX Spectrum (released 1982) had proper display circuitry and did not suffer from this issue.

The ZX80's display hack was all a cheap way to get the data streamed out of RAM. To do this they placed the cpu's program counter(!) at the start of display memory, every time it tried to execute an instruction it would read a byte from memory - which was picked up to generate the display - but the data wasn't returned to the CPU and instead it was fed a byte of zero bits. 0x00 is the NOP instruction on Z80, so it would just increment the program counter and read the next byte. This means successive bytes appear in sequence on the data bus, without having to include a second agent that was capable of making accesses into the RAM - a considerable design simplification. Later, for the Spectrum, a separate circuit which generated and incremented its own address was able to access memory, and it had to be arranged that it would get priority over the CPU (which meant the CPU was considerably slower when running programs in the bottom 16k of memory).

A lot of developers aren't on both though, and that's because it isn't crazy to ignore 400 million users if you don't expect any of them will pay.

Sounds like Top Gear...

And santax suddenly went quiet.

Do you have a link for more information? I couldn't find anything about this with a brief google search.

Anyway, there are several several examples of Apple crediting the discoverer in bug fixes, so I don't know why everybody here is jumping to the opposite conclusion.

FTFY.

We all know what happens when you find and report a bug, exploit or whatever on their devices and store. You get credited with discovering the vulnerability when they fix it.

I agree. This proposal would stack the court system against the little guy, which is exactly the wrong solution to the problem.

The problem is not patent law, per se, but that too many trivial patents are granted. That, and patents which describe a problem, trying to claim that all solutions must infringe.

I doubt that's accurate view of their motivation - although neither of us can prove it either way. But judging on past form they don't seem to have held back their Clang modifications so far, why would they want to start doing so later?

I think it is more likely that they are worried about the patent grant implications of GPL 3. A lot of corporations are, rightly or wrongly. Certainly in the company I work for, the legal department are paranoid about the idea that one of our contributions to a GPL 3 project might be picked up and (legally) included in unrelated projects, which doesn't necessarily need to be software products, and thus we might be deemed to have granted a license to all our patents to a hardware competitor. Now me and the lawyers can disagree on how likely that is to happen in reality, but the final words is that it's way easier for me to get corporate approval to send changes upstream to a BSD licensed project than a GPL licensed one. I suspect something similar is going on at Apple, and that backing the BSD-licensed clang project is enabling them to be a better participant in the open source community, not a worse one.

Apps with source code don't need binary x86 compatability.

Just consider it a having-the-nicest-beaches tax.

No, I'm not going to. Because you're not really interested, you just want to have an argument.

I'll give you my evidence for _that_ claim:

I already talked about this in my first big post to the thread - just search for Rolf Harris. If you were actually the slightest bit interested in reading anything I write, you'd have known that already.

I knew I should have given up on this thread when you brought up North Korea. Does Kim Jong-un have a Godwin equivalent whom I can invoke?

No, the weak arguments are the misrepresenting the origin of the New Testament, the blind assumptions about my background, the claim that atheism is a default, the ignoring of documents dated earlier that you claim, and the gross lampooning of the intent of religion.

Asking for evidence is where we came in, when you asserted that "science is constantly proving religion wrong" and I asked what you meant. Nothing you've said since has backed up that initial claim.

Sorry, was that supposed to mean me? Please, just read the first paragraph of my first post again.

Do you not see that you are claiming the very same position of superior understanding that you're telling me I'm not allowed to have?

And you strike me as someone who uses ad hominem to bolster a weak argument.

Your "onus of proof", "knowing God's will" and "geographical default" objections are noted and argued in the video I already pointed to. And your version of the history of the New Testament is so inaccurate that even wikipedia is less cynical.

Yes, I've done that (well most of it - I hold Master of Sciences degree from Cambridge University). And yet I also believe the claims that the Bible makes about itself, about God, and about us. I believe that the historical authenticity of the text stands up to rational scrutiny. And I don't see any of the things you've mentioned as being contradictory to it. Exactly which religion is disproved by tectonic plate theory?

It is important here to distinguish between the core beliefs of the religion (and I'm going to speak specifically of Christianity, i.e. what the Bible says) versus the traditions, practices and interpretations of strictly human origin (dogma as you put it). Somebody else mentioned Galileo. Yes, he came into conflict with the church authorities when he showed that Earth was not at the centre of the solar system; but it wasn't a "disproof of religion" as the Bible doesn't make that claim. The suggestion that it did came partly from tradition of the prevailing mindset, and partly from an excessively literal reading of verses in Psalms or Ecclesiastes which say things like "the sun rises". (How can I say that one interpretation is excessively literal? Psalms is a songbook. The Bible is a collection of about six different types of literature, and you can identify the bits which are narrative and can be taken pretty much at literal face value, and the bits which are poetry and a more metaphorical approach is justified. When it says "the sun rises" in Psalms that's no more intended to be a definitive statement of relative motion, than when Rolf Harris sang it).

Not to say that all dogma is wrong - to fully understand the Bible would be more than a life's work, so I'm glad that people have given me a useful shortcut by summarising the flow of it. But I don't accept their words blindly - I check it for self-consistency, for consistency with the primary source (the Bible), and for consistency with my experience and understanding of the way the universe works - including my scientific training.

You claim "religion [...] makes a virtue out of accepting dogma" (and maybe some religions do - it's difficult to argue against such generalities) but mine doesn't, and I certainly don't think that's a biblical principle. On the contrary, there are number of biblical examples where people, on hearing something from their religious leaders, are commended for taking a sceptical (dare I say, evidence-based reasoning) approach by checking up on it first to see if it's true. (Acts 17:11 is the first one that comes to mind)

No, I don't agree that those terms are equivalent. Faithful Christians are no more ignorant for believing in God, than an atheist is for not doing so.

Sorry for not responding to every point in your post, but I have a feeling that I'd be here all day if I tried. Can I suggest if you're genuinely interested in how I might justify my disagreement with your points of view, that rather than try to continue a long thread in here, could I point you to a video of an Authors@Google talk by Tim Keller (author of "The Reason for God") in which he expresses similar ideas much better than I can.

Incidentally, I'm not typing this with any particular aim or expectation of trying to convince you that the Bible is true. I'm just arguing that believing it is at least rational, and compatible with a scientific approach. If there were credible contradictory evidence then faith would be preposterous, but I am convinced this is not the case.