Hosted by Jack Rhysider. Always interesting material, some of it very illuminating, and well told too.

Now THAT's what I am waiting for.

NDAs are a wicked invention that are highly over-used in these litigious times. There was a time when a company used an NDA to describe something that was in development to someone else who needed to know; once the product was shipped, or sometimes just announced the NDAs were voided, since every clearly-defined interface and technical detail was published, or discoverable. Inventions were protected from being copied by patents; a company protected itself from having one of its own inventions that was not worthy of the expensive patent process being hoovered up by some questionable bunch of lawyers was by publishing, and establishing the prior art. Then we started the anti-trust behaviour of interfaces and technical details not being published, and before you know it NDAs suddenly apply to products being shipped.

Indeed there is a documented code of ethics for Professional Engineers, that provides a more elaborate code than the three laws above: https://www.nspe.org/resources...

.. and it was probably licence terms for DPS that sent Apple off in the direction of using PDF instead. Adobe's terms were much more friendly for embedding.

Windows succeeded because it was a whole lot easier for application developers to code for one interface - the Windows GDI rather than a whole host of graphical device drivers for this or that video adapter, each with their own extensions to the standard devices. IBM had launched the VGA and standardised a 256 color display of reasonable resolution, but there were many flavors of extensions - line drawing engines, BLT, area fill, alpha overlays, hardware cursors, video overlays, multiple resolutions and color depths. Since the device manufacturers were given the task of writing a device driver for their hardware to present a DDI to Windows, that took away from the app developers the need to write bunches of code to exploit unique features. Windows 3.1 was successful because of the 32-bit API, and avoiding having to write two lots of device drivers, one for 286 and one for 386.

They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings," the paper reported. "They were really slow and noisy, and would get stuck trying to go past each other," lamented one guest.

Serves them right for hiring Daleks ..

A better question than how many, in my view.

I wrote a whole bunch of code in Algol 60 when I was at Uni, since I got free time on the Maths department ICL mainframe, and that was by far and away the most sophisticated language on it. I wrote a poem-writing program that composed poetry that was random nonsense. But it did rhyme!
I wrote some POP-2 on the same machine, which came from the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception at Edinburgh. Plus ca change and all that.

I've written code in all kinds of languages that people have never heard of - PL/516 on an old Honeywell DDP516 in the electronics department at Uni. APL\360, APL\1130 for doing circuit analyses. I've used Forth for testing hardware. I've written code in more assemblers for more CPUs than I care to remember.

The most obscure? Occam on a Transputer.

... but I might be tempted to spend some of my Christmas money on one all the same ;-) ... very excited by it. And love the colour.

Except Kate Winslet would have ended up on the iceberg. Oh, wait .. now there's a plot twist.

I love repairing vintage electronics precisely because you can repair it. When I was unemployed a few years ago, I started up a small electronics repair business, and if I stuck to professional music stuff - amps, combos, effects units and keyboards I could make a small profit at it. Professional musicians love their old kit! Unfortunately integration meant that for younger kit, often the spare was more than a pre-owned replacement from That Auction Site. So, I often got stuck with stuff from the 90s and later, where I would take something apart, find out what the spare would cost and couldn't persuade the owner to part with the funds to have it fixed. I recall when we used to have TV repair shops (those in Southampton might remember S&L TV) they used to charge customers up front before the repair would even be assessed. They couldn't sustain the business model even with that. I've repaired laptops and LCD TVs, but I despaired at repairing iPods and iPads with their layers of glue and too-easily-broken plastic latches. Aside from a not-for-profit venture, or as I do for my own benefit buying stuff that needs a cap job, or power transistors or broken connectors replacing, it's far too often that electronics falls in to the Beyond Economic Repair box.

Dark Mode lasted about three minutes. It's garbage and hurt my eyes.

Give me proper skins like Gnome.

I recall when due to some trademark claim we had to stop calling PLAs by their sensible name derived from being Programmable Logic Arrays. I had a tree of stuff to change to make them PALs instead. Actually I just went to look up via Google when that all happened, and history seems to have been rewritten the other way around. I will now go and have a quick lie down.

My favourite was when PowerGen opened a web site for their Italian operation, called powergenitalia.com ..

.. or other words where in one region the term has a colloquial meaning (Fanny being a slightly more polite version of Pussy in English Mark 1) and in another a more benign meaning? I could wax lyrical about the differences between English Mark 1 and the language of our colonial brethren in the US.

And then there are other languages in the world, after all. I remember my German colleagues giggling at an American stand at CeBIT in Hannover, whose company name was "Blast, Inc". Something to do with blowing, I understand. Quite childish really, but then a chunk of the comedy in the world relates to the naughty parts of human bodies and behaviours.