See off-list reply. -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of John Allain Sent: Saturday, February 25, 2006 9:50 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Re: Stupid eBay user du jor I think when you've lived 10 more years you'll see his point. John A.

Tim Shoppa wrote: Actually, I'm with Evan on this one... To me it's not about being geeky, it's about maintaining a few rudimentary standards and doing some *very basic* research before selling something. Doesn't seem like too much to ask or expect of a seller, and is irrespective of whatever it is that's being sold. cheers Jules

At 02:44 PM 2/25/06 -0600, you wrote: YES! If he doesn't know anything about he has no basis for saying that it's the first! And Evan is right, it's clearly marked II right on the item so there's NO reason for him not to know that it's not the first! Joe

Jim Leonard wrote: Absolutely. There's a very simple distinction here, at least in my own mind. This seller didn't fail to provide information because he/she neglected to do research. The seller made an active claim without verifying the facts, and it just happened to be patently ridiculous. The first is entirely reasonable, but to me the second is a violation of ethics. Doc

Exactly. I've bought many things over the years -- at radio rallies (hamfests), in second-hand shops, and on E-bay -- where the seller doesn't know much, if anything, about it. Maybe it turned up in some scrap, maybe it came from the estate of a relative, whatever. Often I've done rather well by recognising something that others haven't recognised (equally, I've kicked myself a few times for _not_ recognising something as the missing part I need to complete a <foo>). And I have no problem with sellers not knowing much about the item. Nobody can know everything. That does not excuse them from making up false information. IMHO they should either take the time and trouble to check (which may boost the final selling price, so it could be to their adbantage), or just say noting. Present the facts (in this case just quote what it says on the nameplate), let the buyers decide. IANAL but I think that presenting false information like this would be classed as misrepresentation. And even 'innocent misrepresentation' -- giving false information when you had no reason to suspect it was false, is an offence. -tony

here's the latest example on a Univac example. Sadly, the slide set looks to be interesting, and I may bid on it. I don't like that he copied George Gray's Univac History site verbatim, though at least the ripoff was not in the form of a link to George's site that would have stolen his bandwidth too. 8768974367 Jim

In message <m1FD5Ct-000IyWC at p850ug1> ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote: One of these days I'll have to dig out the code for that "virtual ecosystem" simulator and port it on to my 6502 board. For fun :P Basically it's the classic "foxes and rabbits" simulator. I want to see it running on an 8MHz 6502 board, but with a few extensions - a "pack hunting" AI could be quite fun to play with. I wonder how fast I can refresh an 80x24 VT display over a 19200 Baud RS232 link... -- Phil. | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder philpem at dsl.pipex.com | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 512M+100G http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G ... Where's my 640Meg SIMM? I want to run Excel!

Well, depending on the "dumbness" of the program doing the refreshing it can vary pretty wildly. When I was doing the software for the "plug this card into your PC in place of the normal MDA and drive your VT-100 (or 220) with it, it was actually pretty surprising how well a VT220 at 19200 could keep up with a monochrome 80x25 display. All it took was a sufficient amount of processing horsepower at the adapter end to make determinations of what was going on and issuing the proper ANSI escape sequences. We had a threshold that once exceeded determined that it was faster to clear the display and repaint it than send out all of the "move to (X,Y), clear to end of line, etc." sequences. Out of curiosity, I kept a counter that recorded how many times in a session that actually occured. It wasn't very often--and typically coincided with an application clearing the screen. Detecting scrolling activity was a bit tricky. You couldn't hook the BIOS routine to do it, because very few full-screen programs (like Lotus 1-2-3) actually used the BIOS routines and in between samples, the screen may have scrolled several lines. I've sometimes wondered if much of Windows couldn't have been simplified with a dedicated processor to track the contents of the various windowed information instead of having the application redraw it all of the time. Cheers, Chuck

Well, that depends if you have to update every chracter or not. If you only need to change a few locations, it would be a lot faster to send the cursor movement commands and just update those chracters. You misunderstood me. I wasn't talking about copying an area of memory the size of the screen bitmap into the video memory (which is part of the main memory anyway). I was talking about doing a raster operation -- something like XORing a given bitmap with the screen memory. Remember that even an insert-bitmap (i.e. to write a chracter bitmap to the screen) is non-trivial on a machine where the RAM is not bit addressable (the edges of the area you want to replace most likely are not word boundaries). -tony