Only up to a point. As related above, about ten years ago I swapped a 15/20-minute commute for a three-minute commute. I thought it'd be great, I could even go home to lunch for the first time since I was 11 years old! But no, it was crap, and here's why:
o The main one was: there was no time to wind your brain up into work mode in the morning, and you'd come home full of work angst in the evening too. Those little 15 minute drives I'd had to and from work every day had been great for setting up and clearing down my head. In the morning, thinking about what had to be done that day, setting up a gameplan for it, and so forth. Even just waking up, really! In the evening, putting to bed in your head all the crap of the day, thinking about what had to be done tomorrow, chilling out. When you live three minutes away, there's no time for any of that... you arrive in the office still half-awake, and you get home still full of crap. I ended up longing for my half-an-hour a day in the car.
o If there's seriously bad weather (ice/snow/gales), you're the only poor schmuck that's still expected to make it in.
o If there's some big problem (deadline/server-failure/etc.) again, you're the one who's gonna be there first and leaving last.
o Nowadays I'd also add: "no time for listening to podcasts", and even back then I did miss listening to the radio in the car on my way.
o And as for the going home for lunch? Don't do it, 'cos you just DON'T want to go back in the afternoon. Well, at least at that job I didn't. Maybe if it had been like my previous place, where I actively enjoyed every day, then I would have done.
The ONLY thing that was great about living so close was that if something went wrong with the car, or it needed to be put in for servicing, it was still no hassle to get to work. That was it.
Of course, if we're talking about swapping a 60-minute commute for a 15-minute one, go for it! But beware of living TOO close to work!!
FWIW, my Dad always used to say "If they offer you more money to stay, it means they weren't paying you what they thought you were worth in the first place. Don't do it, go anyway."
Some people might even be bold enough to tell their potential new employer that they've been offered a pay-rise to stay...
> 10% isn't enough of an increase to leave a job you KNOW you like for one that you MIGHT like.
Absolutely agreed. Nearly twenty(!) years ago I left a job I liked with a bunch of cool people in a great little company, partly because I felt I was a bit stuck in a rut. A very cosy and comfortable rut, but a rut nonetheless and -- partly spurred on by my then-girlfriend -- I decided to get out of that and grab a new challenge. The new job was much more exciting work (on the face of it), was a mile from my house rather than ten miles away, and paid 16% better. In the end, although it took a lot of umm-ing and ahh-ing, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
Worst thing I ever did in my life.
Turned out the new company was run by arseholes who didn't understand software at all. My previous company was one that bought in fairly generic embedded hardware, and crafted software to run on it for a specific purpose, then sold the resulting gadgets and serviced them. Bespoke tailored software for a narrow market was their raison d'être. The boss used to write the software himself when the company had just five guys in it, so he knew just how it was.
The new company, however, was primarily a hardware design company: they designed complex and clever bespoke cutting-edge hardware, for which the software was merely an annoyingly necessary inconvenience to let the end-user control their beloved babies. Our boss actually said to us one day "Hardware is more difficult to do than software, that's why I became a hardware engineer", thus pissing off and demotivating half his department in one fell swoop. So, when I read the OP say:
"In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily; not many people would use the software, so the appreciation level would be much lower than my current position."
My blood runs cold for him. My gut says "Don't take it".
On the other hand, going up to Director is obviously a serious promotion, and presumably a good career move. But just for 10%? Nahh. 50%? Yeah, worth the risk. 25%? Maybe.
(And also, living that close to work proved to be a major downside as well, not the advantage I thought it would be at all. No time to wind your brain up into work mode in the morning, and you'd come home full of work angst in the evening too. Those little 15 minute drives I had to and from work every day were great for setting up and clearing down your head, respectively.)
Slight correction: torrents were normally up for 42 days, and were removed 14 days before any VHS/DVD/Blu-ray release if one occurred.
FACT have really shot themselves in the foot on this one, I think. Why?
Firstly, a lot of the people who used UKNova will now go off to other torrent sites (their arch-rival registered in Belize, for example) which are totally unfussed about whether they hold commercial material or not. Rather than UKNova's stated policy of "Nothing that can be bought on DVD or video is allowed on this site...If it's available to buy, then buy it", they'll end up visiting places that host complete DVD-Rips etc.
Secondly, the site actually acted as an advert for British TV outside the UK. Many people from other countries have written in to say that they have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of DVDs of UK TV shows that they never would have bought had they not first been alerted to the programmes' existence on UKN before they became ineligible to be on the tracker. Whether they bought the DVDs for the bonus features, or for different seasons that were now prohibited on UKN, or just to have a nice permanent copy that wasn't on their computer, I don't know, but buy them they apparently did.
So if anything, FACT's action against UKNova will just have decreased future DVD sales, rather than increased them, for not just one reason, but two!!
...by Trevor Hoyle made a big impression on me back in 1984 or so. Pollution poisons the seas and then the air we breathe. Supposedly based on a fair bit of research, although reading the reviews on Amazon makes me think that might not be the case after all!
Also another vote for Forge of God, after reading it I gave up on Greg Bear thinking "What was the point of that?". Call me fluffy, but I kept waiting for the twist in the plot that meant we (the human race) saved the day after all... but no.
Childhood's End just made me wistful rather than depressed. 1984 and Brave New World I just found fascinating, although how elements of both are coming true is depressing. I also suspect that if I'd first read them as an adult rather than a precocious kid, I might have found them bleaker than I did.
Yup, "Space" was great, "Time" just depressed the hell out of me... basically take the story of "Space" and then rewrite it through an Ian Curtis filter.
And yet, apart from the TI-57/58/59, TI calculators were generally seen amongst my peer group as "clunky" (the cheap 'n' nasty TI-30 really didn't help this when put up against the likes of the Casio FX-120), whereas the Commodore scientifics were seen as cool. Amazing what badge engineering can do...
Very true. Commodore had some awesome (for the time) calculators in the mid-to-late 70s. I still remember one my maths teacher owned that had more buttons on it than the mind could comfortably conceive (this was a cool thing when I was 12).
For some reason though, when the market moved from LED/VFD calculators to LCD ones, Commodore just seemed to vanish, presumably preferring to concentrate on the PET/VIC/C64.
Yup, back in the mid-80s I worked for a firm that wrote EPoS software for petrol filling stations (gas stations). There was a whole extra feature set that could be enabled simply by programming a special character (might just have been an "@" sign, I forget) into one of the programmable setup fields, and we charged quite a bit for it.
Our field-service engineers got so embarrassed at this (as did those of us in the software department with a conscience), that if time allowed they'd often open the box up and pretend to fiddle inside, maybe faking an EPROM change, to do it.
Eventually one or two site managers got wise, and the word spread as to what the secret was, and everyone was getting it for free, so we had to make it so it really WAS an EPROM change...
I gather that Facebook's implementation of XMPP is non-standard, which is why I thought that Pidgin had to use a plug-in rather than / as well as its standard XMPP module. Someone else on this thread mentions this here.
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. "What's your email?" meant "What's your MSN messenger ID?". I visited some distant teenage relatives in the USA several times around this time, and remember being as surprised that they didn't know what MSN Messenger was as they were that I didn't have AIM.
Absolutely agreed. In the UK it was Fidonet BBSes in the early 90s, then as the internet rose it was IRC and a lot of ICQ, but once MSN Messenger got going in 1999/2000 that was it, everyone used it, everyone had it, apart from a minority (say, around 25%?) who used Yahoo Messenger, but at least half of those had MSN as well. And that's still the case when it comes to non-Facebook-chat messengers.
I have spoken to literally hundreds of people (not just geeks) online over the last 20 years, many in the UK, but some in the US and Australasia too, and I've only ever met someone with AIM once, back in 2000. It was just unheard of over here.
Incidentally, you can talk Facebook Chat directly with a Pidgin plug-in, which is very useful.
The Z80 processes around 40k instructions per second, compared to EDSAC's 650 IPS. That's sixty times as fast as the EDSAC.
That's pretty unfair on the Z80, too. To get anywhere near that figure, you'd have to take your basic 1MHz Z80, and have it continually execute the longest possible instructions, which were rarely used and took up 23 T-states (clock cycles) - that would give you 43,478ips.
In practice, most Z80 instructions executed in the range 4 to 13 clock cycles, and just about every Z80 I ever met back in the day was the 4MHz part, so you're talking between 300k and a million instructions per second. So more like a thousand times faster than poor old EDSAC.
(Nowadays of course, the modern Z80 clones/cores run the basic instructions in just 1 clock cycle.)
Yup, I was caught by something similar myself. It gets even more fun when you get to the other end of the year and you find out there's a day with 25 hours in it.:-) This led to one app I worked on declaring that October had 32 days in one particular menu, because a previous programmer on the project had subtracted the time_t() of 1st October from the time_t() of 1st November, then divided by 86400 to get the number of days in the month, then rounded up for some reason (probably because six months earlier he'd spotted that April only had 29 days, and rather than find out why, he just fudged it, the so-and-so!).
This was partly due to the Microsoft C V5 library (yes, it was that long ago, early 90s) handling DST stupidly; the same module in the V6 library fixed the problem. However we couldn't upgrade the whole library as it would have bust our memory requirements and caused other, now long forgotten problems, so we shut our eyes, crossed our fingers, and substituted V5's time module with the V6 version and, thank God, it worked perfectly without trashing everything.
We also rewrote our own code to do stuff a bit more cleverly than that. And at least we tested. Which is more than Apple seemed to have done. I wrote Y2K-aware time-handling code back in the mid-80s for some filling station EPOS machines, which damn well worked 15 years later, because I'd tested it.
To get back to the subject line, this is why I still use a real alarm clock, only using my mobile's alarm as extra backup for important things like catching flights. I've written enough time code to know how difficult it can be to get it done truly correctly, but you really would have thought Apple would have the knack by now.
By the way, that's not to say that it might not have been on other platforms (e.g. Apple II, TRS-80) as well as, or even before, the Commodore PET, I just know that I played it on the PET first, before the ZX81 even came out.
> The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81...
That's the second time recently I've seen that myth trotted out. It's not true. Although a good game, it was actually a copy of a similar game for the Commodore PET that I played at least a year before the ZX81 even came out.
I know this for sure as I used to play the PET version at school (they got a 3016 in March 1980), and then when I got my own ZX81 (which came out Spring 1981), I was thrilled to be able to play a version of the same game at home when it was released a few months after that.
Beautifully put. I was thinking along the same lines myself, only without the domestic abuse bit (although that's quite plausible, of course), and was going to post similarly.
For me, the key phrase in the article is the quote from the chip-company guy: "This is a common problem that can occur if a dog is involved in a marital dispute or it is lost or stolen. We encourage people to sort things out amongst themselves but if they refuse there is not much we can do." Note how early on in that sentence the words "involved in a marital dispute" are mentioned. First, basically. I suspect this was intended as a hint to us all.
And then he goes onto say about people sorting things out "amongst themselves", which would be implausible if you didn't actually know the thief, wouldn't it? You only sort things out in that manner if you know the other party. All in all, I think it's a very cleverly-worded press statement.
It would certainly explain why the police "also refused to disclose the information after concluding that there was no criminal case to answer", and why the chip-firm is recommending that he go the civil route -- if the dog was jointly owned by both himself and his ex-wife before they split up, then it's not going to be a criminal theft, is it?
Surprised that nobody else here but you spotted this one. Shame you've not been modded up for it (if I'd had points today, I'd have done so instead of posting).
One disappointing detail about every cheap cam I've found: none seem to have any way to turn off the near-infrared LEDs without simultaneously turning off "night mode". I think they must come from the factory with the LEDs hardwired to the camera board and no means of independent control...Pretty much the only way to fix it right now is to tape or paint over the LEDs, or physically unsolder them from the circuit board (so you can have IR sensitivity without the reflection from the onboard LEDs).
Isn't this because otherwise you can see through people's clothes with them? I seem to remember that's why they changed the firmware on the early Sony Handycams that had a "Nightshot" feature: they stopped it from being enabled in daylight as people were using it to take "x-ray" photos of hotties walking down the street. Cue a big rush on the first generation of cameras when they announced that change, no doubt!
Wow! I live in a pretty quiet backwater of the UK these days, but was amazed to see that someone has wardrived along the road past our group of houses and picked up several of my neighbours' access points, mainly those with "BTHomeHub2"s.
Luckily I've got an old Mark 1 so wasn't picked up from the main road! Time to upgrade my encryption though, if everything in the house will cope with it -- and I'm not sure it will, which is why I haven't bothered until now, that and thinking that no wardriver would live within miles of me and wouldn't want to steal my meagre rural bandwidth anyway! Time to think again...
A 16550 in the early 1980s? I'm sorry, but I think not.
I wrote a lot of serial comms drivers back in those days, and I don't think I even/heard/ of a 16550 until the very late 80s. First one I actually met was probably in my brand new 486DX33 box I got in 1992, although to be honest I don't remember for sure. I didn't code for one until about 1994, and that was on an embedded system, as you still couldn't guarantee that all PCs would have them rather than 16450s or even 8250s.
Also bear in mind that the original 16550s were broken so you couldn't use the FIFO feature (which was the whole point of the thing) properly; that wasn't fixed until the 16550A came along.
Correction to my post: reading the full specification (rather than just the summary), it seems that rather than a Z80-SIO chip, it actually has a dedicated Z80 processor to do the I/O with, and doesn't say what the actual UART hardware is. So could be a Z80-SIO, or more likely just a bunch of 8250s. Let us know if you open it up!
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Only up to a point. As related above, about ten years ago I swapped a 15/20-minute commute for a three-minute commute. I thought it'd be great, I could even go home to lunch for the first time since I was 11 years old! But no, it was crap, and here's why:
o The main one was: there was no time to wind your brain up into work mode in the morning, and you'd come home full of work angst in the evening too. Those little 15 minute drives I'd had to and from work every day had been great for setting up and clearing down my head. In the morning, thinking about what had to be done that day, setting up a gameplan for it, and so forth. Even just waking up, really! In the evening, putting to bed in your head all the crap of the day, thinking about what had to be done tomorrow, chilling out. When you live three minutes away, there's no time for any of that... you arrive in the office still half-awake, and you get home still full of crap. I ended up longing for my half-an-hour a day in the car.
o If there's seriously bad weather (ice/snow/gales), you're the only poor schmuck that's still expected to make it in.
o If there's some big problem (deadline/server-failure/etc.) again, you're the one who's gonna be there first and leaving last.
o Nowadays I'd also add: "no time for listening to podcasts", and even back then I did miss listening to the radio in the car on my way.
o And as for the going home for lunch? Don't do it, 'cos you just DON'T want to go back in the afternoon. Well, at least at that job I didn't. Maybe if it had been like my previous place, where I actively enjoyed every day, then I would have done.
The ONLY thing that was great about living so close was that if something went wrong with the car, or it needed to be put in for servicing, it was still no hassle to get to work. That was it.
Of course, if we're talking about swapping a 60-minute commute for a 15-minute one, go for it! But beware of living TOO close to work!!
FWIW, my Dad always used to say "If they offer you more money to stay, it means they weren't paying you what they thought you were worth in the first place. Don't do it, go anyway."
Some people might even be bold enough to tell their potential new employer that they've been offered a pay-rise to stay...
> 10% isn't enough of an increase to leave a job you KNOW you like for one that you MIGHT like.
Absolutely agreed. Nearly twenty(!) years ago I left a job I liked with a bunch of cool people in a great little company, partly because I felt I was a bit stuck in a rut. A very cosy and comfortable rut, but a rut nonetheless and -- partly spurred on by my then-girlfriend -- I decided to get out of that and grab a new challenge. The new job was much more exciting work (on the face of it), was a mile from my house rather than ten miles away, and paid 16% better. In the end, although it took a lot of umm-ing and ahh-ing, it seemed like the obvious thing to do.
Worst thing I ever did in my life.
Turned out the new company was run by arseholes who didn't understand software at all. My previous company was one that bought in fairly generic embedded hardware, and crafted software to run on it for a specific purpose, then sold the resulting gadgets and serviced them. Bespoke tailored software for a narrow market was their raison d'être. The boss used to write the software himself when the company had just five guys in it, so he knew just how it was.
The new company, however, was primarily a hardware design company: they designed complex and clever bespoke cutting-edge hardware, for which the software was merely an annoyingly necessary inconvenience to let the end-user control their beloved babies. Our boss actually said to us one day "Hardware is more difficult to do than software, that's why I became a hardware engineer", thus pissing off and demotivating half his department in one fell swoop. So, when I read the OP say:
"In the new company, software is not what this company does primarily; not many people would use the software, so the appreciation level would be much lower than my current position."
My blood runs cold for him. My gut says "Don't take it".
On the other hand, going up to Director is obviously a serious promotion, and presumably a good career move. But just for 10%? Nahh. 50%? Yeah, worth the risk. 25%? Maybe.
(And also, living that close to work proved to be a major downside as well, not the advantage I thought it would be at all. No time to wind your brain up into work mode in the morning, and you'd come home full of work angst in the evening too. Those little 15 minute drives I had to and from work every day were great for setting up and clearing down your head, respectively.)
Good luck to the OP, whatever he decides.
Slight correction: torrents were normally up for 42 days, and were removed 14 days before any VHS/DVD/Blu-ray release if one occurred.
FACT have really shot themselves in the foot on this one, I think. Why?
Firstly, a lot of the people who used UKNova will now go off to other torrent sites (their arch-rival registered in Belize, for example) which are totally unfussed about whether they hold commercial material or not. Rather than UKNova's stated policy of "Nothing that can be bought on DVD or video is allowed on this site...If it's available to buy, then buy it", they'll end up visiting places that host complete DVD-Rips etc.
Secondly, the site actually acted as an advert for British TV outside the UK. Many people from other countries have written in to say that they have dozens, sometimes hundreds, of DVDs of UK TV shows that they never would have bought had they not first been alerted to the programmes' existence on UKN before they became ineligible to be on the tracker. Whether they bought the DVDs for the bonus features, or for different seasons that were now prohibited on UKN, or just to have a nice permanent copy that wasn't on their computer, I don't know, but buy them they apparently did.
So if anything, FACT's action against UKNova will just have decreased future DVD sales, rather than increased them, for not just one reason, but two!!
...by Trevor Hoyle made a big impression on me back in 1984 or so. Pollution poisons the seas and then the air we breathe. Supposedly based on a fair bit of research, although reading the reviews on Amazon makes me think that might not be the case after all!
Also another vote for Forge of God, after reading it I gave up on Greg Bear thinking "What was the point of that?". Call me fluffy, but I kept waiting for the twist in the plot that meant we (the human race) saved the day after all... but no.
Childhood's End just made me wistful rather than depressed. 1984 and Brave New World I just found fascinating, although how elements of both are coming true is depressing. I also suspect that if I'd first read them as an adult rather than a precocious kid, I might have found them bleaker than I did.
But...but...surely it has a happy, rather funny, and thought-provoking ending?
Yup, "Space" was great, "Time" just depressed the hell out of me... basically take the story of "Space" and then rewrite it through an Ian Curtis filter.
Thanks for the info.
And yet, apart from the TI-57/58/59, TI calculators were generally seen amongst my peer group as "clunky" (the cheap 'n' nasty TI-30 really didn't help this when put up against the likes of the Casio FX-120), whereas the Commodore scientifics were seen as cool. Amazing what badge engineering can do...
Very true. Commodore had some awesome (for the time) calculators in the mid-to-late 70s. I still remember one my maths teacher owned that had more buttons on it than the mind could comfortably conceive (this was a cool thing when I was 12).
For some reason though, when the market moved from LED/VFD calculators to LCD ones, Commodore just seemed to vanish, presumably preferring to concentrate on the PET/VIC/C64.
However I can't write software which increases my L3 cache.
You can now! ;-p
Yup, back in the mid-80s I worked for a firm that wrote EPoS software for petrol filling stations (gas stations). There was a whole extra feature set that could be enabled simply by programming a special character (might just have been an "@" sign, I forget) into one of the programmable setup fields, and we charged quite a bit for it.
Our field-service engineers got so embarrassed at this (as did those of us in the software department with a conscience), that if time allowed they'd often open the box up and pretend to fiddle inside, maybe faking an EPROM change, to do it.
Eventually one or two site managers got wise, and the word spread as to what the secret was, and everyone was getting it for free, so we had to make it so it really WAS an EPROM change...
In a word, yes.
I gather that Facebook's implementation of XMPP is non-standard, which is why I thought that Pidgin had to use a plug-in rather than / as well as its standard XMPP module. Someone else on this thread mentions this here.
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. "What's your email?" meant "What's your MSN messenger ID?". I visited some distant teenage relatives in the USA several times around this time, and remember being as surprised that they didn't know what MSN Messenger was as they were that I didn't have AIM.
Absolutely agreed. In the UK it was Fidonet BBSes in the early 90s, then as the internet rose it was IRC and a lot of ICQ, but once MSN Messenger got going in 1999/2000 that was it, everyone used it, everyone had it, apart from a minority (say, around 25%?) who used Yahoo Messenger, but at least half of those had MSN as well. And that's still the case when it comes to non-Facebook-chat messengers.
I have spoken to literally hundreds of people (not just geeks) online over the last 20 years, many in the UK, but some in the US and Australasia too, and I've only ever met someone with AIM once, back in 2000. It was just unheard of over here.
Incidentally, you can talk Facebook Chat directly with a Pidgin plug-in, which is very useful.
The Z80 processes around 40k instructions per second, compared to EDSAC's 650 IPS. That's sixty times as fast as the EDSAC.
That's pretty unfair on the Z80, too. To get anywhere near that figure, you'd have to take your basic 1MHz Z80, and have it continually execute the longest possible instructions, which were rarely used and took up 23 T-states (clock cycles) - that would give you 43,478ips.
In practice, most Z80 instructions executed in the range 4 to 13 clock cycles, and just about every Z80 I ever met back in the day was the 4MHz part, so you're talking between 300k and a million instructions per second. So more like a thousand times faster than poor old EDSAC.
(Nowadays of course, the modern Z80 clones/cores run the basic instructions in just 1 clock cycle.)
Yup, I was caught by something similar myself. It gets even more fun when you get to the other end of the year and you find out there's a day with 25 hours in it. :-) This led to one app I worked on declaring that October had 32 days in one particular menu, because a previous programmer on the project had subtracted the time_t() of 1st October from the time_t() of 1st November, then divided by 86400 to get the number of days in the month, then rounded up for some reason (probably because six months earlier he'd spotted that April only had 29 days, and rather than find out why, he just fudged it, the so-and-so!).
This was partly due to the Microsoft C V5 library (yes, it was that long ago, early 90s) handling DST stupidly; the same module in the V6 library fixed the problem. However we couldn't upgrade the whole library as it would have bust our memory requirements and caused other, now long forgotten problems, so we shut our eyes, crossed our fingers, and substituted V5's time module with the V6 version and, thank God, it worked perfectly without trashing everything.
We also rewrote our own code to do stuff a bit more cleverly than that. And at least we tested. Which is more than Apple seemed to have done. I wrote Y2K-aware time-handling code back in the mid-80s for some filling station EPOS machines, which damn well worked 15 years later, because I'd tested it.
To get back to the subject line, this is why I still use a real alarm clock, only using my mobile's alarm as extra backup for important things like catching flights. I've written enough time code to know how difficult it can be to get it done truly correctly, but you really would have thought Apple would have the knack by now.
By the way, that's not to say that it might not have been on other platforms (e.g. Apple II, TRS-80) as well as, or even before, the Commodore PET, I just know that I played it on the PET first, before the ZX81 even came out.
From the article:
> The first game to simulate 3D was 3D Monster Maze for the Sinclair ZX81...
That's the second time recently I've seen that myth trotted out. It's not true. Although a good game, it was actually a copy of a similar game for the Commodore PET that I played at least a year before the ZX81 even came out.
I know this for sure as I used to play the PET version at school (they got a 3016 in March 1980), and then when I got my own ZX81 (which came out Spring 1981), I was thrilled to be able to play a version of the same game at home when it was released a few months after that.
Beautifully put. I was thinking along the same lines myself, only without the domestic abuse bit (although that's quite plausible, of course), and was going to post similarly.
For me, the key phrase in the article is the quote from the chip-company guy: "This is a common problem that can occur if a dog is involved in a marital dispute or it is lost or stolen. We encourage people to sort things out amongst themselves but if they refuse there is not much we can do." Note how early on in that sentence the words "involved in a marital dispute" are mentioned. First, basically. I suspect this was intended as a hint to us all.
And then he goes onto say about people sorting things out "amongst themselves", which would be implausible if you didn't actually know the thief, wouldn't it? You only sort things out in that manner if you know the other party. All in all, I think it's a very cleverly-worded press statement.
It would certainly explain why the police "also refused to disclose the information after concluding that there was no criminal case to answer", and why the chip-firm is recommending that he go the civil route -- if the dog was jointly owned by both himself and his ex-wife before they split up, then it's not going to be a criminal theft, is it?
Surprised that nobody else here but you spotted this one. Shame you've not been modded up for it (if I'd had points today, I'd have done so instead of posting).
One disappointing detail about every cheap cam I've found: none seem to have any way to turn off the near-infrared LEDs without simultaneously turning off "night mode". I think they must come from the factory with the LEDs hardwired to the camera board and no means of independent control...Pretty much the only way to fix it right now is to tape or paint over the LEDs, or physically unsolder them from the circuit board (so you can have IR sensitivity without the reflection from the onboard LEDs).
Isn't this because otherwise you can see through people's clothes with them? I seem to remember that's why they changed the firmware on the early Sony Handycams that had a "Nightshot" feature: they stopped it from being enabled in daylight as people were using it to take "x-ray" photos of hotties walking down the street. Cue a big rush on the first generation of cameras when they announced that change, no doubt!
Wow! I live in a pretty quiet backwater of the UK these days, but was amazed to see that someone has wardrived along the road past our group of houses and picked up several of my neighbours' access points, mainly those with "BTHomeHub2"s.
Luckily I've got an old Mark 1 so wasn't picked up from the main road! Time to upgrade my encryption though, if everything in the house will cope with it -- and I'm not sure it will, which is why I haven't bothered until now, that and thinking that no wardriver would live within miles of me and wouldn't want to steal my meagre rural bandwidth anyway! Time to think again...
A 16550 in the early 1980s? I'm sorry, but I think not.
I wrote a lot of serial comms drivers back in those days, and I don't think I even /heard/ of a 16550 until the very late 80s. First one I actually met was probably in my brand new 486DX33 box I got in 1992, although to be honest I don't remember for sure. I didn't code for one until about 1994, and that was on an embedded system, as you still couldn't guarantee that all PCs would have them rather than 16450s or even 8250s.
Also bear in mind that the original 16550s were broken so you couldn't use the FIFO feature (which was the whole point of the thing) properly; that wasn't fixed until the 16550A came along.
If you look at the specification page, it actually has an 80186 processor in it. "586" was the model number of the machine.
Correction to my post: reading the full specification (rather than just the summary), it seems that rather than a Z80-SIO chip, it actually has a dedicated Z80 processor to do the I/O with, and doesn't say what the actual UART hardware is. So could be a Z80-SIO, or more likely just a bunch of 8250s. Let us know if you open it up!
Yup, and Zmodem is generally preferable to Kermit as it's so much faster.
As a former Fidonet point this really takes me back! Happy days.