robinsonb5

I never particularly liked the standard hard disk icons from MagicWB, but in general I really liked the aesthetic, especially the drawers with topic icons overlaid.

As for MUI, it was a fantastic system for programming user interfaces and for displaying user interfaces, and it's one of the great tragedies of computing that nothing of that calibre exists today as a cross-platform user-skinnable UI toolkit.

It was however, very slightly lacking (on the Amiga) as a system for using user interfaces because it lacked that sense of immediacy for which the Amiga's UI was previously known.

With traditional Intuition gadgets the rendering was done within a high-priority system task, so if you click on a gadget you'll get immediate visual feedback even if the application isn't ready to respond. With MUI the drawing, and thus feedback, doesn't happen until the application's paying attention. Because of that, MUI applications felt non-native. (Even Windows-like!)

That might not seem important in today's world where that level of responsiveness was burned on the altar of network backends and web presentation layers, but that sense of "having the computer's full attention" is a big part of why the Amiga still has fans today.

Because they don't have the informed consent* of the owner of the device wich ends up running the code?

* no, small print in a click-through agreement doesn't count.

Also, strictly one question per email - otherwise only the first will be answered and any others ignored!

The problem is, quite simply, insurance.

When something is paid for from a big nebulous ball of money rather than straight out of people's pockets, the downward pressure on prices just isn't there in the same way. The conversations between practitioners and insurers are about whether something is necessary, not about whether or not the practitioner is charging too much for it.

Here in the UK we see it, too - not so much in human healthcare since we have the NHS - but very definitely in animal healthcare; vets' bills have skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, in a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop with the rise in pet health insurance.

I would pay what I used to pay for DVDs.

Sure, I can do that, but there's some value in being able to check quickly and easily that, for example, the xz utils binaries shipped by a major distro actually match the published source.

Also useful for checking that a binary containing GPLed code does actually correspond to its published source.

Sure, but a signature doesn't prove that a particular binary came from a particular codebase - merely that a particular human (or other trusted entity, for varying degrees of "trusted") has vouched for it.

Being able to reproduce the binary from the source code and being able to verify that it's the same as the original is quite important in some contexts.

But online retail (and food delivery, etc) does seem to be slowly but surely eating away at local shops so I think it's within the realm of possibility.

Online retail eating away at local shops is a problem with two aspects - one of which is largely ignored and much more pernicious.

Yes, many people are shopping online which reduces footfall in the town centres. If this were a case of all the existing businesses simply shifting away from physical storefronts to virtual ones it would merely be unfortunate.

What's far worse is that the vast majority of the business that shifted away from a diverse collection of bricks-and-mortar stores now goes through one of a very few online retail giants.

Likewise, a couple of food delivery apps are parasitising takeaway food businesses.

And now we're allowing a handful of AI giants to tollbooth software development.

Showing my age here - it took me a while to realise this has nothing to do with old Apple keyboards and mice.

In my experience the driving-behavior part of my brain can run virtually autonomously

It can, but I've heard quite plausible claims in the past [1] that you shouldn't let it - because that's one of the things that kills motorcyclists. Your autopilot brain is looking out for other cars quite effectively - but a motorcycle isn't a car, and can slip through un-noticed if you're mind is engaged elsewhere.

[1] Citation needed, but lacking I'm afraid!

TMK includes firmware for an ADB to USB converter which is really easy to build using a 5 volt ProMicro. For the last one I made I just cut an S-Video cable in half and wired it directly to the board. Just needs one pullup resistor.

(Typing this now using an Apple M0116 with salmon Alps keyswitches, using that very converter.)

If some of the things that the C standard left undefined had instead been made implementation defined then the compiler would at least be obligated to do something that makes sense on the target architecture, rather than having license to take the lawful-evil route. (Plenty of architectures have addressable RAM at location zero, for instance.)

For some reason this always brings to mind that moment in Red Dwarf where Kryten, devoid of his behavioural chip, deems it appropriate to serve roast human to his crewmates. "If you eat chicken, obviously you'd eat your own species as well, otherwise you'd just be picking on the chickens!"

but the text color is usually set slightly off black (why!!??)

This can be cause by colour management. If the black is defined in terms of RGB and then converted to CMYK as part of the pre-press workflow, you'll typically have a mix of all four inks, and not necessarily 100% K - it depends on the colour profiles. For a black-only print job the C, M and Y channels will then be discarded, leaving a maybe-not-pure black.

Good choice!

oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package. There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/

(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)

For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)

Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.

Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.

The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.

For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.

I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.

IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.

ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.

The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.

If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.

In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway

I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.

So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free. (Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)

There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.

I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux

Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.

What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.

When did we stop spelling it "nybble"?

Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.

It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.

I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)

Indeed. Trusting that it will only be processing the user's queries - as opposed to, say, becoming part of a distributed grid of AI processing nodes - isn't a bet I'd be willing to place much money on.

In the small town where I live we have a small cinema with three screens. They always start the movie at the advertised time - no adverts, just a few trailers in the preceding 10 minutes. You can book online, but I usually just walk in and buy a ticket at the desk. The seats aren't assigned, so you can pick whichever you like.

Occasionally I have a "private screening" where I'm the only one in the auditorium. The most recent example was "The Mummy". I hadn't fully thought throught the implications of watching a horror movie alone in the middle of a darkened 65-seat auditorium!

There's another town a few miles away where a similar cinema has both assigned seating and 20 minutes of adverts before the movie.

But the point is that FPGAs are that accessible today.

They've been accessible for a lot longer than most people think. The original Minimig project (an FPGA recreation of the Amiga chipset, coupled with a real 68000 CPU) started in 2005 - more than 20 years ago! And 15 years ago there was already a complete Amiga core (chipset and CPU) running on the Terasic DE1 development board, the C-One FPGA computer, and the Turbo Chameleon 64 cartridge.

Today's FPGAs are certainly more affordable and more capacious (especially in terms of DSP and RAM blocks) but the biggest shift is that, as you say, it's now possible and affordable to have the complete PCB assembled in short runs, which is a real blessing given that so many FPGAs come in BGA packages.

Those would be the Pork Futures Warehouse from Discworld.

I've always enjoyed working in Tcl/Itcl and Tk/Itk

In the near future I need to lash up a windows utility to generate a bunch of PDF files from a CSV (in concert with GhostScript), with specific filenames. I was trying to figure out the best approach and hadn't even considered Tcl and Tk - with Itcl you might have just given me a new rabbithole to explore! Thanks! (...I think!)

My memory wasn't playing tricks on me after all - Suse Linux 6.3 had KDE 1.1.2 with several nice themes [1] - I'm pretty sure the version I used back in the day was SuSE 7 (a boxed copy, bought from Staples!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/1m3vkba/kde_th...

I'm sure it was version 1.something that had the Bryce theme - I remember being annoyed that the scrolling title feature had disappeared when KDE2 came out.

But it's always possible that my memory's playing tricks on me.

This brings back memories of Chunky-to-Planar conversion on the Amiga, where the Xor trick was combined with bitshifts and masking to rearrange the bits in 8 32-bit words in reasonable time.

KDE1 had some very nice themes! I remember using one that drew inspiration from the visuals of Bryce on the Mac. Dark mode theme - and animated window titles which would scroll gently if the window title was too long to fit.