palordrolap

The 64GS was one of Commodore’s last gasps at trying to make some money using the 8-bit parts they still had left in stock. The whole thing was a disaster.

It wasn’t based on the C64. It was a C64. Without a keyboard and some of the other ports missing. A fact that came to bite anyone who tried a C64 cartridge game that needed keyboard input.

And IIRC one of the games that came bundled with it was a game like that.

They were at least smart enough to have the BASIC startup pointer (the one that otherwise caused READY. to appear) in the ROM patched to go to a neat little graphic telling people to turn it off, plug in a game and turn it back on again.

What Commodore saved by releasing the GS, the customer ultimately paid by needing to buy games in a format more expensive than disk or tape that would run on a regular C64.

… and given the time period, lots of people were buying PCs and offloading their regular C64 hardware and a ton of games for the price of the GS and its handful of games. And that C64 would run any GS game that was likely to come out.

As long as it’s not Kekistan.

One of my biggest shocks of recent years was when an Internet acquaintance in Trinidad came out as a Trump supporter.

I was like “You’re brown. He’d hate you.”

Except I didn’t actually say that. I did the internet equivalent of walking backwards slowly and carefully while smiling and quietly blocked them.

I guess my former acquaintance’s sentiments extend to the government there.

An elderly person I know got it in their head that the people coming across the Channel in boats were a serious problem.

“Thirty thousand a year!” they complained. “It’s an invasion!”

So I said “The population of Britain is 70 million people. At 40,000 a year for the next 25 years, ignoring all other increases in population by people already here, do you know what the population would be? 71 million. You don’t need to worry about it. And stop talking about an invasion. If it was an invasion, they’d have guns and we’d shoot them first. Most of them are trying to get away from guns.”

(This is not to say that there isn’t a heavy humanitarian and financial burden involved with dealing with those people, only that it’s not the problem some people think (or want us to believe) it is.)

“But they don’t live like we do.”

“I don’t live like you do. I eat foods you won’t touch and spend all my life on a computer. Where are you going to deport me to?”

Either I’m getting through to them or they know not to bring it up around me any more.

You really think there’s anywhere that’s far enough away?

Ah. There it is. The distinction you’re making that wasn’t clear. You don’t take what they say seriously, but you take them seriously otherwise.

Well, let me tell you, when a despot says they’re going to do something despicable, it doesn’t matter whether they’re wearing clown makeup when they do so.

Sounds an awful lot like you’re taking Batman, a person you said was a clown, seriously.

I mean, I get you. Bruce Wayne is a capitalist, but depending on the writers, his philanthropy is incredibly deep and he’s doing the best he can, crazy as he is.

But you (deliberately?) missed the surface level message I was going for. You don’t turn your back on the Joker and you take him seriously.

And even if Bats is also a clown, are you saying you wouldn’t take him seriously if he started causing havoc?

Tell that to Batman.

There is a legit criminal in the White House, clown or otherwise, and we should be taking it as seriously as Bats does the Joker.

Copilot copilotted your Copilot. Something something marklar.

He’s the leader of a “country” that exists in the hearts and minds of every Catholic as well as the Vatican proper. There are bound to be people who love him and those who hate him within that “country” the same way it works with any country and as such, his office has influence.

Is it any more than if he was merely the leader of another city state? I’d say so.

Tell me, without looking it up, who the leader of San Marino, the other Italian city state, is. (And if you can, how many other people, especially outside Italy, could do the same?)

I never thought I’d be on the side opposing the US in WWIII, but hey ho, here we go.

(And this might even mean I’m on the side opposite my own government depending on how things progress here in the meantime.)

It’s worse than that. They don’t want the Palestinians to die. They want them to suffer.

Frankly, I’m surprised an old-school juggernaut like Zawinski doesn’t already have his own mail server. It’s not like he lacks the technical ability to set one up.

Are you sure that’s not pre-Python? Maybe one of David Frost’s shows like At Last the 1948 Show or The Frost Report.

Marty Feldman (the customer) wasn’t one of the Pythons, and the comments on the video suggest that Graham Chapman took on the customer role when the Pythons performed it. (Which, if they did, suggests that Cleese may have written it, in order for him to have been allowed to take it with him.)

Actually yes, but I didn’t expect they’d go down the same avenues with the Pi.

I actually considered getting one of the computer-in-keyboard versions precisely because I’m of that same generation, but I couldn’t justify the expense.

Edit: It has come to my attention that it isn’t actually the people behind the Pi doing this. I really should read more rather than jumping to conclusions. There’s a few obvious rewrites I could make, but I think the prediction at the end is still valid even if the route I took wasn’t the right one.

This would appear to indicate that someone in charge of product design at Pi HQ is a Gen X-er or Boomer desperate to relive computing history through their own products.

Computer on a board. Bigger computer on a board. Computer entirely within a keyboard.

And now a computer in a PC-like case.

Prediction: The next step will be some kind of ARM-based cloud service.

Russia are never going to agree to this…

Russia won’t agree to anything that isn’t the complete capitulation of Ukraine and Zelenskyy being replaced with a Russia-friendly puppet leader.

Having a plan out there in public isn’t just about the plan, it’s also a message to Russia that Ukraine (and Zelenskyy) aren’t making it up as they go along and that this is what they intend to do if the Russians don’t idit’ na h-y go home.

I did think about this, but I imagined that the Russians would find some way to fly mostly over populated areas on purpose so that shooting them down would risk a fireball falling on innocent civilians.

Escort flights might be a better choice, but I can see that turning into a multi-jet dogfight over innocent civilians instead, with a risk of multiple fireballs.

On the one hand, Hungary has remained somewhat different from its neighbours because it’s surrounded by mountains and hard to get in or out of by land so it would seem a safe bet for a swap, but on the other, it’s the 21st century and mountains aren’t so much of an obstacle any more. Would we really want to give Putin an airstrip in the middle of Europe?

It would be foolish to assume Putin’s expansionist plans are limited to Ukraine. It’s just that Ukraine is proving a bit more difficult than he expected and he’s had to concentrate his efforts there.