Spectrum Computing

Jbizzel wrote: ↑Thu Jan 11, 2024 10:20 pm ZX Crumpets

Who knew crumpets is an anagram of spectrum.

I remember a few years back on the WoS forums the surprise from a lot of users, me included, when told that the user "murtceps" is Spectrum spelt backwards.

It's quite astonishing what people send to the tip or dump in a skip. Even a cursory glance on eBay is going to tell you that a C5 in poor condition is still probably going to fetch at least £100. Someone will buy it. I always have a quick look in any skips we pass on our evening walks just to see i...

Feel free to jump in for my go.

Race Against Time?

People who refactor your code without telling you and it doesn't work how it used to is annoying though. If it ain't broke don't "fix" it! Oh god, yes. Is there anything worse than performing a code review where you notice swathes of working code has been refactored? Currently have a deve...

What you've just described though Pete is a developers life. We have all written sh*t code - anyone who says they haven't is a bold-faced liar. But we recognise what you found out - there's a better way of doing things and do it that way instead. It's called refactoring and is an important part of a...

Boss: Hey, you, programmer ... Programmer: Me ? Boss: We need to code this stuff... by Friday. Presto, presto. Programmer: But... I program for 6502. Boss: What ? Programmer: This is Z80. I don't code for Z80. Boss: What is the difference ? Programmer: Well, for start ... Boss: You are programmer, ...

Monty On The Run without a shadow of a doubt. It's a masterpiece.

Ah I see. Fair enough if it's your own code that's faulty in the first place. I work with a lot of third-party APIs and this would be a perfectly valid fix because getting a third-party to change their results/fix their bugs is like pulling teeth.

Earlier today I was asking some people: what line of code would make you never hire someone? My anti-hire line was: s = s.replace("&", "&"); Out of interest - what's so horrifically bad about this? I can see a purpose for it when cleaning up a simple string, ...

The guy responds: => People dying is inconvenient I agree - and they should be mindful of the chaos they cause when they do that. In my pre-developer career, working for Local Government as a young man, there was one senior management idiot who 100% thought like that. There was another guy, a team ...

Cursors are the work of the devil. But cursors within cursors - jesus... RBAR at it's finest. The company I'm currently doing work for has a section of the system that's database driven. The guy who created this section has long since gone, but he's legendary for a being a developer who followed the...

Relax, I was apologising for my own story, not yours. Apologies, equinox. I completely misread that and I'm being a bit too sensitive in my sleep-deprived state (I've been running on 2-3 hour kip per night for the last two weeks due to some ill health). Again, please accept my apologies for my tone...

equinox wrote: ↑Wed Jan 03, 2024 2:46 pm This isn't a real anecdote and you may have seen it the same place I did (DailyWTF??)

Edit: I'm being an idiot...

We got the phone lines full of screams from people who had been relying on the ****ing bug, where Norwich and North London had the same transport planning. This one reminds me of a report I inherited many years ago. It was run via a VB application, populating millions of rows of data from SQL Serve...

Not specific code examples but... A developer asked us to write down what the function he was working on had to do exactly as he could not wrap his head around it. So myself and a manager painstakingly wrote out in pseudo-code exactly what it had to do (it wasn't complicated at all). Two days later ...

Happy New Year everyone.

1. Academy
2. Contact Sam Cruise
3. Hijack

I've never seen it before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a...

I'll get my coat.

I'm currently counting 21 of them for sale on ebay, all inside 24 hours. Hard to see those rather optimistic £700 - £1,000 buy-it-now price tags being met much longer. Which is good. I appreciate people ordered their machines 3 years ago and many people's circumstances have changed, but it still ra...

For those who received their NETX's today did you get an email with Tracking details? I've not received anything yet and nothing in my spam folder either. Saying that, the Kickstarter post said that ALL UK backers should get an email by tomorrow evening so maybe I'm just further down the list or he...

1. Highway Encounter
2. T.L.L.
3. Deflektor

Said it before and I'll say it again - Highway Encounter is one of the greatest 8-bit games of all-time.

Mine arrived about an hour ago! But I can't (or won't) open it until Christmas Day. 25-12-2023 marks exactly 40 years to the day that I got my original 48K. So it's gonna be that little bit more special. And the first game I'll play will be Jetpac - like I did 25-12-1983. (almost) 51 year old me is ...

1. Hypersports
2. Renegade
3. Target Renegade

Looks spot-on to me.

Some 8-bit classics in that list - I always feel Costa gets a little left out in great Speccy coder discussions. Highway Encounter is one of the greatest 8-bit games of all time, never mind just on the Speccy. So you can guess where my vote will be going .