Posts by oldandgrey 28 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2023
Yes, I have been using them too: https://ithistory.org/db/hardware/ibm/ibm-port-punch
As the legislation differs from place to place, and tends to be formulated very broadly and imprecise, it would be foolish for the Linux and BSD communities to get involved. If you touch this mess, you make it your problem.
Not just the @gmail.com addresses:
$ host -t MX theregister.com
theregister.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 1 aspmx.l.google.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx5.googlemail.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 10 aspmx4.googlemail.com.
theregister.com mail is handled by 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
"We're doomed. Doomed!"
"Old-time web users will fondly remember Lynx, a text-only browser that ran from the terminal."
Lynx is still very much alive:
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=lynx&searchon=names&exact=1&suite=all§ion=all
I use it every day. The Mutt mail client employs Lynx to render/sanitize the html messages that misguided souls keep sending me.
That's correct, but users have different expectations. They want their documents to remain readable over time. I've seen a company replace its old PostScript printers with modern PCL ones. Suddenly the Adobe fonts that were available through PostScript were no longer present. Microsoft Word, in its infinite wisdom, decided that in all existing documents the Adobe Courier font was to be substituted by Microsoft Wingdings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings). Very awkward if you have a huge store of documents that have to stay immutable for archiving purposes.
Kurt Vonnegut's 1976 'Slapstick, or Lonesome No More' now reads like a prophesy:
"The fuel shortage was so severe when I was elected, that the first stiff problem I faced after my inauguration was where to get enough electricity to power the computers which would issue the new middle names.
I ordered horses and soldiers and wagons of the ramshackle Army I had inherited from my predecessor to haul tons of papers from the National Archives to the powerhouse. These documents were all from the Administration of Richard M. Nixon, the only president who was ever forced to resign.
I myself went to the Archives to watch. I spoke to the soldiers and a few passers-by from the steps there. I said that Mr Nixon and his associates had been unbalanced by loneliness of an especially virulent sort.
'He promised to bring us together, but tore us apart instead,' I said. 'Now, hey presto!, he will bring us together after all.'
I posed for photographs beneath the inscription on the facade of the Archives, which said this:
'THE PAST IS PROLOGUE.'
'They were not basically criminals,' I said. 'But they yearned to partake of the brotherhood they saw in Organized Crime.'
'So many crimes committed by lonesome people in Government are concealed in this place,' I said, 'that the inscription might well read, "Better a Family of Criminals than No Family at All"."
(From chapter 34)
Read the book, don't watch the movie!
Nonsense. Making it more difficult to jam is not the purpose of Galileo. Quoting Wikipedia:
"One of the aims of Galileo is to provide an independent high-precision positioning system so European political and military authorities do not have to rely on the United States GPS or the Russian GLONASS systems, which could be disabled or degraded by their operators at any time."
Another purpose of Galileo is to have better coverage at higher latitudes. But the main reason for Galileo is to be independent of the 'Selective Availibility" of GPS.
Have my upvote.
HTML email is, at its best, a waste of time and resources. At its worst it's the tool of spammers and scammers. Honest people send email in plain text.
Apropos Thunderbird, it's a mail client I would really want to like, as it's free and open and multi platform. About a year ago I switched to Thunderbird for my private use, to drag myself into the modern world. I seriously gave it a try, but last month I went back to Mutt. To me, as an old dog, It felt like coming home.
Thunderbird is just unwieldy, compared to Mutt. Some people may think that Mutt is hard to configure, but typing up a muttrc is actually a lot more straightforward than writing the user.js that Thunderbird relies on for a number of, what are to me, vital settings. Thunderbird hasn't got a comprehensive manual to guide you in these matters, but Mutt has: http://mutt.org/doc/manual/
To be more precise: Axel Springer seems to claim that modifying the DOM infringes on its copyright. But Axel Springer isn't the author of the DOM. Axel Springer authors, and its web servers transmit, HTML code. The DOM is constructed at the receiving end. By convention, a modern web browser builds the DOM out of the HTML it receives, as an intermediary stage before rendering the web page to the screen. Again by convention, this intermediary stage is where the client side scripting takes place. The ridiculousness of Axel Springer's claim is made evident by good old Lynx, the browser that renders web pages without even being aware of any DOM.
Well, my 1989-vintage Casio F-91W digital watch isn't aware of leap years. At midnight it jumped to the 1st of March. I had to put it back to 29th of February. Now let's see if it's smart enough to know what to do when the 29th ends.
The MS Excel spreadsheet is just a metaphor for the traditional big sheet of paper, ruled with rows and columns and folded down the middle, that has been a tool of accountants and auditors since the beginning of time. Numbers were written and calculations were made by hand. I'm old enough to have used them extensively. These manual spreadsheets were also prone to misuse and errors. There's nothing new under the sun. I could tell some real horror stories about MS Excel from the days when I did 2nd line support for ERP software. Customers would complain that the data they extracted from the ERP system was all wrong when, in fact, they mangled the extracted data in their spreadsheets. My company didn't support MS Excel (you have to call Redmond for that, haha) but every now and then I had to go over to a client for some handholding, because they couldn't be convinced otherwise that the ERP system was not to blame. Now, of course, these customers messed up in MS Excel, but most times I also had to remind them of the rudimentary principles of accounting. Having no clear picture of what you are doing, that's where the silly tinkering starts.
That's what Patrick Volkerding did in March 2005 when he removed the GNOME desktop from Slackware, it being a "moving target" that was too hard to follow for his small team. Removing the GNOME desktop, however, still leaves us with GNOME's GTK widget toolkit, that is being used all over the place, like in the XFCE desktop. They lost me when they incorporated GTK's client-side decorations in XFCE's dedicated window manager, fouling up existing applications. That's when I went back to my simple, well behaved window manager from back when: Blackbox. Let others frob with the Heath Robinson contraption / Rube Goldberg machine that is a desktop environment.
