The whole point of the C64 Ultimate is to combine what was basically about a dozen or more individual C64 retro projects into something that is consumer friendly. If you ever tried to acquire these things, you'll quickly find out they're often made in small quantities by individual hobbyists all over the world, and buying each piece separately you'll find will cost more from all the individual shipping and piece costs.

The company basically scanned the Commodore retro landscape, picked the components that were the best and most manufacturable, and built it. Then put up a company behind it where they package it into a box and then ship it around the world. Instead of someone having to piece it together from dozens of small time indivviduaals, you can basically buy it in one go with effectively free shipping and it's all integrated and ready to go.

What they are doing is capitalizing on the "Offline" part of the brand. The C64 heralds from a time when computing wasn't online and when you aren't bombarded with subscriptions and alerts and other things. And they're leaning heavily into that with the phone - you use it to communicate with others, not doomscroll.

And anyhow, putting together a real C64 already costs a fair chunk of money - working units are several hundred dollars, plus a disk drive, or other parts like an SD-IEC and adapters to modern TVs and replacement power supplies (because the originals have a tendency to short out now and provide more than 5 volts to the 5 volt line, popping all your rare and now unobtainable chips).

While I probably won't get the phone, I did buy a C64 ultimate. It's just nice having it all in one place. It has modern conveniences that get rid of the stupidly slow disk and tape loading (which were slow even when it was contemporary - basically it was software handshaking serial).

And to be fair, at least they're doing something on brand. Not like the dozens of brands bought up by Chinese companies selling all manner of crap bearing RCA, Zenith, Westinghouse and other old school brand names from companies long dead.

If it's in the CPU I bought, how should it never have had that feature that's clearly in the CPU I bought?

This is the CPU equivalent of those car makers wanting a subscription to enable the heated seats. Maybe AMD will enable it for $5 a month or something.

It's basically buying a car and having heated seats installed even if you didn't pay for them. They did it because it simplifies production. If you choose to enable it yourself, it's unsupported - so if you activate the heated seats yourself that sets your car on fire, they may not warrant the vehicle against the damage and insurance might deny coverage. And yes, usually the heated seats are just left unconnected, so people have hooked their own power connections and switches to manually turn them on and off.

Likewise, producing a a die is very expensive - it's like $100K per mask, and you need 20-30 masks per chip (so about $2-3M to produce a mask set which needs ot be done before you can make one chip). Those chips are then fused so they can be customized per requirements. So one die design can fulfill several lines of processors from low to mid to high end chips and create product differentiation.

Of course, the documentation also will usually not describe features you're not supposed to have,usually those registers are marked as "must be set to zero" and configuration registers are not documented. It's why you often find missing registers in register listings.

Enterprising people who have access often can discover hidden functionality if they try misconfiguring the register and seeing what happens. But such things are unofficial.

Of course, it's entirely possible that because to fix some bugs, they may need to disconnect some blocks so they could re-use the transistors - because often you can get away with just re-wiring the transistors rather than having to remake the entire mask set. It's what makes the difference between say, B1 to B2 steppings from B5 to C0 steppings - the B1 to B2 usually just means a metal layer rework so it's much cheaper as you only need to redo a subset of masks. When they go from B5 to C0, it usually indicates that a whole new mask set was created.

But it could easily mean that they fused out the MEU so you couldn't unofficially enable it, or maybe they borrowed the transistors to fix some other flaw.

Last I checked, networking was a four-letter word, and those letters were CCNA.

Especially when this particular "anything new" is the subject of pending copyright litigation. See Doe v. GitHub.

Probably to the effect "We failed to poach the people who developed this framework in the first place. Can we import some immigrants, pretty please?"

Well, school has been sucking the life out of reading for over a century nowadays. It's always been a problem - honestly I love reading and read a ton of stuff. But I also remember reading being a chore in school because the stuff you're forced to read generally isn't very interesting.

My school didn't force me to read 1984. So one day out of boredom I read it because it was referenced in a lot of places, and I found it a very interesting read. Maybe not if I was forced to read it, long before anyone really pointed out why I should be reading it.

Maybe school should start emphasizing why the reading materials chosen are actually relevant instead of just going through Jane Eyre and analyzing all the subplots.

Of course, this is in early elementary school though. By college you already should have a basic amount of reading level because you gotta read your textbooks. But also by then most reading I woiuld do would be recreational, and some from genres I really dislike in my days growing up like history. But give me a book on the history of computing? Yes please!

School does a bad job at encouraging students to read in the early years. But by college one should already be able to be literate. Then again, with your phone pinging every 5 seconds, chances are the real reason is shortened attention spans - you can't sit down and read a page without your mind wandering or waiting for that ping.

I remember back in 1997 seeing countless job postings that needed 20+ years of Cisco experience, and have seen the same sort of insanity repeated with every new tech fad that comes along. Why would the biggest tech fad of all be any different?

At least though Cisco was around since 1984 so you could get the better part of 20 years of Cisco experience.

The worst was 1996 or so and needing 5+ years of Java. Which has only come out the year before.

I always wonder though what recruiters and HR folks think when all their applicants all seem to fall well short of their requirements/

That said, what Trump did was crazy, and Iran might be more likely to get a nuclear weapon now than they were a year ago. If you want something done right, don't trust Trump to do it because he's like an MBA: his primary skill is knowing how to take power.

That happened during Trump 1.0 when he ripped up the agreement Obama negotiated with Iran. Something that took the better part of a decade to accomplish - 5 years of informal back and forth negotiations followed by an intense 18 month diplomatic formal negotiation.

And by the end of it, Iran had nuclear inspectors crawling everywhere, including ones from Israel per the agreement. That was the status until Trump ripped up the agreement, and Iran kicked everyone out as retaliation.

The best I got from this is "status quo" - the US side saying that. Iran's side just added reparations. In other words, nothing happened other than hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, lives wasted, and we're back to where things were on Feb 27.

Except now Iran knows it has a powerful economic weapon it can wield effectively.

And prices will not drop - everyone's been using up the strategic reserve to make up for the loss of transport. Those reserves need to be replenished, which is why gas prices will remain elevated.

At best, because the strategic reserves were likely reaching levels never seen since they were established in the 80s, is likely why the US had to agree to basically a nothing plan - because in a month or two, gas prices will shoot up again and it'll be like the 70s.

Add to that "The US doesn't need anything Canada has". Well, if you kill off importing oil from Canada, that trade deficit turns into a surplus with Canada. Oil imports are the only reason there is a trade deficit.

Funny how we worry about tiny errors in sqrt on a computer and yet we rave about hallucinating AI. I think fundamentally the problem with AI is that the common non-techie is believing the answer from AI like they do from a sqrt. I still recall I think it was Intel that had the major flub in some IEEE math result that many wanted to have Intel do a complete recall. I can't remember the details it has been so long and I didn't own the product so it did not affect me. If it was an AI error, no one would even notice it was such a tiny error like microsoft's calculator.

Because people do expect their calculators to give exact results. And small errors in calculations bring questions.

AI hallucinations are giving people huge problems - you see it in forums where people ask for help, show the AI guidance they used and then everyone is pointing out the AI slop they followed was incorrect. But then the poster gets indignant and refuses to take on any suggestions to fix their problems because they believe AI is better than humans.

As for the Intel bug, it's because early Pentium 60 and 66MHz chips had an error in the FDIV instruction that would give an incorrect result. Intel tried to play it down as an error so minor no one would encounter it, but that just made people angrier. Because it's not that no one would encounter it, but that if one did, they wouldn't know and might be relying on it. That and the fact that the Pentium was an expensive chip, so people spending several hundred dollars on a CPU would want one that was correct.

The error was in the division tables that are on-chip. Like many floating point operations, the instruction relies on internal tables to speed up calculations. The problem was the code to generate the tables was faulty and produced a zero instead of a value. That faulty table was burned into the table ROM of the chip and produced the erroneous values. CPUs with a correct table didn't have an issue. (I believe the table was a log table as it's easiest way to speed up a division by turning it into a subtraction).

Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I fixed that for you. Can't wait for the mental gymnastics fiat supporters have to go through to explain how inflation is good for the economy

The economy relies on money circulating around. You need to spend money on stuff which will keep the economic engine going because that money then gets spent on other things and so on.

Now, there are actually 4 events - deflation, zero growth, inflation, and hyper inflaction. All except inflation are bad. Deflation is bad because it encourages savings - why buy a loaf of bread today when tomorrow it's cheaper? Sure you need to eat, but maybe you need to eat a little less so we can stretch what we have a little longer so we can avoid buying what we need the longest.

Zero growth is similar - though at least it means you eat as necessary since it's not going up or down. But there's no incentive to do anything.

Hyperinflation, or really, inflation beyond mild inflation is bad - and that's generally considered more than 2%. Prices are going up so fast that wages can't keep up and you really need to buy now which contributes to more inflation.

Mild inflation is where you generally want to be - usually between half to 2% at most. Here your savings will devalue over time, but not so fast you need to spend it all immediately with none for the future, but also means you want to generate value added products from the economy - gathering raw materials, refining it, processing it, producing products, etc. Each economic step adds value and the economy grows.

Bitcoin's fault is it's deflationary. Spending it is stupid - it's why BTC commerce is a fringe activity. No one's using bitcoin for everyday transactions because it costs more and it's stupid. You're better off collecting bitcoin because it's a fixed quantity and once you run out, that's it. That's why the big whales in BTC aren't doing anything - lots of coins are stored up in cold wallets. Winklevoss twins reportedly own over 20% of available coins. Of course, they have enough assets elsewhere that they're not using BTC at all for day to day living.

The real scam to Bitcoin is simple - it's trivial to start another coin. It's why any exchange has hundreds to thousands of coins they support. You know the big ones, but the rest are all small bit players. You also know Trump coin is in there.

Meanwhile, starting your own fiat currency is a lot harder. It does happen now and again, but very few actually last, almost none span beyond a local town and get very little coverage. But there is the odd alternative currency that does - any Canadian knows about Canadian Tire Money, which in the early days were paper reward coupons but before they stopped issuing physical notes started having real money-like protections because many people began accepting them informally.

How long can you trust that the operator of the server offering a particular LLM wll let you continue to choose a seed?

What is practically useless are all the airplanes in the air at any one time, most of which burn more fuel in one flight than it takes to heat a 200 homes for an entire winter. We need electric aircraft - badly.

But electric aircraft are impractical from many aspects. You see, unlike a car whose engine is basically idling most of the time an aircraft engine is working hard. A car engine may generate 200+hp on 1.5L displacement, but an aircraft engine can get 160hp... from 5L. But the aircraft engine will be developing 80-100hp just flying through the air, while the car engine is likely only doing 10hp to maintain speed on the highway.

Car engines have been repurposed - but are severely de-rated.

The end result is the car engine spends a lot of time doing nothing and running inefficiently, which leaves open possibilities like hybrid drivetrains where you can run the engine more efficiently and use the excess to charge a battery for later use.

Hybrid engines have been tried for airplanes, and they aren't very successful because there aren't many opportunities to generate electricity.

Electric aircraft are a reality for short (20 min) flights or training, but it's not likely to be beyond it.

What part of people don't give a shit as long as their water and power are not affected is unclear to you? That's it. Data centers in small towns will always affect the local infrastructure. In decades past, datacenters had to build all the infrastructure they needed. And the locals didn't give a shit as long as they did that. What is happening now is the rush to build new datacenters wants to skip over the infrastructure problems.

Until recently, datacenters were located near urban areas - the power, water and more importantly, data connectivity required it.

The ONLY reason they're going after small towns is cheap land. But small towns rarely have big city infrastructure - the power and water are sized for the expected growth - a data center can easily consume double or more than what the town does and overwhelm the local utilities. And other times, it's simply beyond what the resources have available - aquifers only replenish so fast.

And in other places, it's water rights being bought up for data centers - but it also means excess use costs a lot more.

A compiler is a deterministic process that runs locally on a modest home computer in reasonable time without needing an expensive NVIDIA GPU, doesn't regurgitate memorized copyrighted code from its training set, and doesn't boil the oceans in a datacenter for training plus use.

Exactly. My first thought was "this guy gets all the luck".