Andy Toone

Eeek! I'm not panicing!

It's going to be a great weekend :)

On 8-bit machines, if you're reading keys on an interrupt - i.e. every 20ms, debouncing is much less of an issue - you're just not going to be scanning a given key fast enough to see multiple key presses.

You can just put one diode on each row. It means that certain key combinations will generate 'phantom' keys (specifically, a set of three keys pressed in a 'square' on the matrix will look like the fourth key in that square is also pressed), but this is not usually an issue in practice.

Technically, if you're on an FPGA, you could write a full USB keyboard polling state machine that just gave the CPU a key event buffer it could poll - though I expect VERA takes up a lot of the available gates.
Depends also on how set you are on your how keyboard hardware.

You don't need the full 16. You could have 8 bidir - write the row out to a latch then read back the column. Or have an external 1-of-n counter for the row that gets incremented each time you read, reset on write. Also depends on keyboard size - 8x7 is a pretty complete keyboard.

How much I/O do you have 'spare'? Including write?

That would take an age to read, which is particularly wasteful if you're only wanting to check the status of a couple of keys. Why not a fairly standard matrix?

They were far too slow to move onto CDROM as a distribution media. There was a solid window where CDs were too hard/expensive to copy, making the PC market and other platforms viable when piracy had been running rampant.

Was just hearing about Thallion releasing Lionheart for the Amiga with no copy protection, but the message that if not enough people actually bought it, it would be their last Amiga title.

It was.

We have the solution we want... we just need to find a problem that fits it!

There's a lot of factors, and that's certainly one of them. When managers are fearful of decline and highly risk averse (for a number of reasons), everything becomes about slowing down the fall. You can see it happening at many levels, dressed up as "value" and "security" and other positive words.

And Cambridge itself is an object lesson - the tech cluster grew out of government initiatives in the 70's and early 80's, with most of the unusually high number of 'unicorns' (billion dollar companies) coming out of groundwork laid fifty years ago.

The culture in government is antagonistic to any sort of serious technological and industrial policy, and has been for a few decades now.

Having had a career in the Cambridge tech cluster, watching all that homegrown talent being squandered (many war stories!) is heartbreaking.

.. and of course that AI will be kindly given to us by the usual large American corporates.

Remember, our government still haven't resolved the Horizon disaster, and still pay 'failed' consultancies for more consultants.

Unfortunately, we have a managerial class who think that IT is largely a question of picking the most expensive consultants, and engineering is grubby work that someone else can do.

They're currently all convinced AI will create jobs, save the economy and fix health and education...

With Reeves' recent breaking of rental rules, most seem to be focussing on how serious the breech was.

Are any MPs going to suggest the whole system has chronic bureaucratic bloat caused by a succession of governments that only ever add more and more rules to no useful end and significant cost?

Nine months ago I was saying "Perhaps relying on a handful of American cloud providers is a bad idea"... silence.

Then AWS, and Azure go down within a few weeks of each other.

All the big pundits: "Hey guys, I've just thought that relying on a handful of American cloud providers is a bad idea".

I'll never say no.

Good job Labour aren't so stupid as to do anything like this...

...oh.

The early machines were very hand built. Bathroom sealant holding the windscreen in hand built. Coupled with mad levels of power, they were a handful on the road.

One of the Stamper brothers, owners of Rare (Ultimate Play The Game) bought a Diablo when the company became incredibly successful.

Then he apparently barely ever drove it as it was absolutely terrifying on the road. Early Lambos were... raw.

A genuine question for those in media.

Is the current failure of journalists to confront dishonest responses from politicians and public figures a libel law thing, a fear of being denied access, a cherry picking of interviewers, or just a lack of subject knowledge in reporters?

A friendly millionaire needs to fund some people to experiment with online communities and marketplaces that systemically reward positive contributions.

We've done this before (Stack Overflow being an interesting example), and should do it again.

Having an LGBT+ friend who was in the armed forces, this is overdue but welcome. The accounts of abuse and discrimination are shameful.

I have a 16GB PC.
Chrome is using 4GB
It tells me 82% of my memory is "in use".

That means ~9GB - over half - of my computer's memory is being used by random crap, most of which provides no benefit whatsoever.

(Yeah, Windows)

That's why I built MicroBeast specifically into its own case. I had a pile of naked PCBs from other kits and wanted something better.

Adverts should be representative of traditional British families

I've got this great idea for a pilot...

It's also worth pointing out how the current social media context prevents stuff like this from happening.

It gets suggested, the surface is scratched in a few hundred character post, people like it and move on, putting a neat sticking plaster over the idea and almost immediately forgetting it.

The Cambridge tech scene exploded in the 80's and 90's for exactly that reason - many smart people having conversations in pubs. A worthwhile number of those conversations turned into world changing ideas and businesses.

Good stuff comes from a fertile environment where real commitment can happen.