arkorott

oh, well. More than 1000 posts with very little to nil new & useful product and project status information.
Hopefully before May is up we will have the promised detailed technical update.
Roughly a week left...just sayin'

@alexonline: these are all awesome !
You should get a Grammy

BTW, through the DBK and ericpeets discussion I have a question as I got intrigued: in a distributed system with several CPUs and controllers how can you ensure they stay in sync ? ie how do you avoid that a given controller brings the whole orchestra out of whack ? How / who keeps the tempo according to specs ?
I will look it up in any case but perhaps somebody knows.

oh, come on guys. I started coding for fun in the 80s on Ataris (400/800/520st in that sequence), then moved to PCs and much later had my first Mac in the 90s as they were impossibly expensive. Later I programmed my different Palm Pilots, and the last decade or so been focussed on mobile (iOS & Android) which reminded me of the constraints of the early days. Always for fun, never as a career. 

Going back to the topic at hand,  I coded all of this time with different levels of intensity. I can talk about different projects more than others.
In the earliest days I sometimes copied code from a magazine & adapted it creating a Frankenstein, later when I understood what I was doing I recreated a v2 from scratch. Learnt a lot in the process. 

I can fondly remember one failed crazy project. Remember that later magazines came with a kind of checksum code for each line that if it matched then you had no typos ? We (my older brother and I) tried to create a program that if you typed the checksums it would spit the lines for you. It obviously did not work.

But I do not think I can speak on the details without looking at the code.

Another example: I did write code to convert binary to decimal and hex and vice versa, but I can't remember the details. Now, looking at the code I remember what I did, or in this case I just took note of the posts that helped me create something that worked (even in different languages these algorithms once understood they are very easy to adapt). ie:
http://www.mkyong.com/java/how-to-convert-hex-to-ascii-in-java/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/934790/how-can-i-convert-hex-number-to-integers-and-strings-in-objective-c

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2832729/how-to-convert-ascii-value-to-a-character-in-objective-c

In essence you are giving DBK a hard time because you guys Ericpeets & TBD (correctly) find gaps in the explanations. I admit I cannot still understand what he did (and I did use peeking and poking to read and write registers in the Ataris). If I had to vote it would have been this TBD idea later shot down:

he could be slightly misremembering or mis-stating what he did. If you stored data as binary values in registers, which he claims he was doing, then you might want to write those registers out to tape or disk, so you might set up a loop in BASIC to PEEK through all the memory addresses to obtain the values and then write them as a 'file' (in the loosest sense of that word - a data stream with some bytes to indicate end of stream) to tape or disk. This kind of task was fairly common and trivial, so I could envision him having written a simple BASIC program where he poked some data into a sequence of memory addresses, and then peeked through those addresses to store the data on tape.

The point is, what he is describing might be wrong in terms of misremembering, but he does NOT need to be an expert developer to give his idea / opinion of why the firmware rewrite is needed. 

I also suspect that freeing the memory is only partially true (and it is the line given to everybody), and highly likely they have a jungle of hacks on top of hacks they need to clean up.

Later job experience managing a team developing business mobile apps taught me a lot more. Feature freeze is critical if not they will chase their tails forever and never finish.

@TextBladeDenied:

If they are doing it all wrong, then why do you think they are very smart? ('They' being Mark Knighton of course, who refers to himself as 'we' and 'us'). It doesnt make a lot of sense, wouldnt you agree? Smart people do not behave so stupidly. Smart people are quite capable of acting maliciously however.

They came out with an awesome product idea & execution that so far has a ton of people including me following-up after 4 years.
That they are technically adept, might not mean they are also marketing & PR geniuses. (Jobs / Woz capabilities compare comes to mind).
Just trying to help imagining myself in their shoes / company. Also it is professionally case study grade material. So I took it as a challenge.

I have mentioned a different path for them to act in their exchanges with customers (ex, current or prospective). I mentioned this a few times already so I will now stop. That is all. Everybody can learn new stuff. You can always be positively surprised. Call me naive.

alexonline said:
Arkorott - many thanks for your kind words. The ideas generally are spontaneous, they pop into my mind, but then I do need to write what I’ve thought, and refine and edit it. 

Keep them coming. They are fun to read. 

I used to watch the cool progress update which was very detailed in my order page, looking forward to delivery just weeks away. I never imagined I would voluntarily cancel after two years, nor that in 2019, we’d all still be waiting. 

Me too. I would never have believed I would be part of this saga for so long: I ordered so long ago, then like 6 months later cancelled afraid with all the delays, then re-ordered late 2016 as it seemed (to me) that GR was imminent, and from then have been checking the forums every day. (BTW, last few months activity at WTF seems to be low. Maybe because of lack of new info / updates or have most non-treggers been banned already?).

Arkorott, your advice is great, and from the heart - it is genuine! 
I’ve seen variations of it before given to Mark, but it seems to go in one ear and out the other. 

We can only hope. It would be so much easier and fun to exchange info and have Q&As on product & project without the attitude. Customers should not need to tiptoe around the CEO temper. 

Common sense dictates that the longer the delay, the more they should want to communicate, not the other way around. When ANY company fails to communicate on topic and / or starts to communicate less and less warning lights come up and people get concerned. It is only normal.

I find really strange the amount of effort WT puts into attack / discredit the posters, conspiracy stuff,  or defend itself vs. talking about the TB & project. Which is the whole point of them having a review in a publication such as AI to begin with. Why not stay on topic ? Can't understand how people that smart can do this. If I were them I would count the amount of words they posted talking about the TB (on topic) vs everything else they wrote about and reflect on that. On a bigger company like Apple or Tesla if you are not Steve Jobs, Tim Cook or Elon Musk you would get your ass fired on the spot.

What we all just want is a small multitouch keyboard with long battery life and extreme portability as promised. 

Very true. I hope that after all the hype buildup it will meet expectations whenever the stars align and we have GR. 

Hopefully before the next ice age. Ha. (It's a - bad - joke. Just sayin')