It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
> what would happen if you were to break that law? like im talking enforcement here not whats on the books.
In the UK, nothing. There are far more important laws to enforce.
You will get some fat whiny old guy bitching about it to anyone who will listen, but you literally could not pay Ofcom to take an interest, and there are only about two people in the whole of the UK who have the skill to do anything about it.
Don't Ofcom still raid the odd shortwave pirate occasionally if they're broadcasting in one of the GMDSS bands? Fairly sure it happened to a station a few years ago but I could be misremembering.
Then again, as you say, they probably have much better things to do. Would be nice to hear more stations popping up on MW too as all the legit stations leave the band.
Yes, but then that's typical of the way laws are enforced in the UK.
If you're not actively pissing someone off, it is unlikely anyone will bother you.
No-one is going to give a shit about you running unattended digi modes on 80m except some guy who wants the exact same 3kHz out of 300kHz that you are using to moan about his sore feet to his pal across town.
GMDSS is considered Pretty Fucking Important, and messing with it will attract the attention of the Coastguard, who have the legal right to make even the Diplomatic Corps miserable.
Let me put it this way - when a defective navigation light ballast at a US-operated naval base on the Clyde was jamming 156.8MHz for about a ten mile radius, absolutely obliterating the distress and calling channel, Ofcom got involved, passed their findings onto the estuary radio control office, the RNLI, and the Coastguard, who had all been reporting an issue, and "gave advice" on further enforcement they could carry out. Within half an hour the nav light was shut down, after a phone call where the Coastguard explained that there were some very angry people on their way with a radio engineer who was about to put a Stihl saw through their fence and shut it off himself.
They were on that thing within the hour, replacing the lamp assembly and phoned estuary control before firing it back up, and peace returned to Channel 16.
Gaelic only has 18 letters (and W isn't one of them) but the vowels have diacritics - grave accents - that mark them as being longer.
This makes some things a bit of a nightmare because words can have different meanings based on those sounds, and that can drastically alter things. "Fèis" - "faaysh" - means "festival", "feis" with a short vowel is not a word you'd use in polite company.
Some of the letter combinations (at least in Irish) can be represented by another Roman letter. Like mh can be represented by v. One short showing how funny this can be is: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1EBnFqRKZ7A
Also in Irish Gaelic they use the acute accent rather than grave accent - both languages used to use both of them, for slightly different lengths of long vowels, but we got rid of that in the early 80s.
The whole consonant-h fricative thing is only marginally easier to explain than German noun genders, but yeah if you see a b, m, or n followed by an h then it sounds kind of a v, although the only one that *actually* sounds like a V in English is "bh", like in "telebhisean", which sounds pretty much like it does in English.
> How long would it take for NSA to crack them if they had say the equivalent of a million GPU's? (either GPU's or crypto tuned ASICs)
Something I've often wondered is where the curve between "shit encryption / nation state cracking" crosses.
How much CPU would you need to be Annoyingly Difficult to crack?
I reckon with elliptic curves you could be quite annoying within about a minute on a 1980s-level CPU, to the extent that you could send a fairly ephemeral message quite quickly that would take disproportionately long to crack. Certainly long enough for the thing you have communicated to be no longer worth the effort to know.
You could probably do 256-bit Curve25519 key generation in under ten minutes on an Apple II or Commodore 64, because the 6502's maths is terribly limited, but something like the Tandy Color or Dragon 32 with its 6809 processor (or hey why not the Ensoniq Mirage sampler?) could do that in probably a minute or so because it has a MUL opcode that's quite fast.
I reckon that would keep even a fairly interested nation state chewing away long after your message had been read, understood, and acted upon.
I wonder how many different species of cat are just called "cats" in the local language of wherever they're found?
We have just got normal house cats, that we call cats. They're very cuddly and they're great for keeping the mice under control.
Somewhere in the forests of deepest Borneo is a civilisation only recently reached by primitive Westerners, who don't know how to make fire and cook food using only sticks and rocks, and who cannot tell the difference between the blackish-blue berries around 15mm that are good to eat and the blueish-black berries around 16mm that are spectacularly poisonous, and only know things like how to make jet aircraft and rifles and the Rolleiflex 2.8FX camera.
Wandering around their village, high in the mountains, are cats the size of Galloway bulls, terrifying looking things, teeth the size of cucumbers.
"Oh those? Yes, we call those 'cats'. They're very cuddly, and they're great for keeping the feral hogs under control."
It’s hard to find an authoritative source with perfect data but it seems unanimous the US is in the bottom quintile in terms of share of GDP from tourism.
Almost all countries below the US have much more immediate concerns about physical safety.
I mean don't modern CPUs basically just run an x86_64 emulator on a RISC machine anyway? Like there's a layer between the microcode and the actual x86 instructions already.
No, that's a myth. It's true that the instruction decoder in a CPU core translates from ISA opcodes to micro-ops for the backend, but those micro-ops are in many cases functionally very close to the ISA instruction and decidedly not RISC-like. For example, the ADD r/m64, imm32 instruction (read from memory, add constant, write to memory) is translated to a single micro-op on several Zen architectures [1], which is far from anything you could call "RISC".
No, they don't. x86 is a superscalar processor, and it does what all superscalar processors do--translate the instructions into µops for execution and dispatch to the various execution units, with the µops not being 1-1 with the original instructions. However, it was supposed to be impossible for a CISC architecture to be superscalar, so this is what spawns the myth that it's somehow cheating by executing a RISC architecture under the hood.
The fact that x86 is not RISC, it contains many instructions which support memory as the source and destination or both, something which is often an advantage in terms of code density, and speed.
Yes, but the “architecture-independent” bytecode for these RISC machines that run underneath your various Intel and AMD CPU models is the x86_64 instruction set.
VLIW implies packets of different independent instructions that can be executed in parallel. I dont think this definition is ever true for the vast majority of x86 instructions.
I hate that you're being downvoted for asking a perfectly reasonable question.
Guys, if you don't like the premise of the question, reply and say why, don't downvote.
I think it's a good question, and my guess for the answer is this - which is going to be the easier problem to solve?
"Hi guys if you want to publish on Steam you have to use this specific tooling and language that'll compile to native code on first run" and everyone just has to do it
or
"Hi guys we want to be able to publish everything so it runs on Arch Linux that we run on our Steamdeck, even if only Windows binaries are available, so given that Gaben is a billionaire what we'll do is just pay guys to make Wine not suck"
I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.
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