Posts by Dickie_Mosfet 28 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2024
MicroPro gets a mention in the book "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters"...
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/in-search-of/9781590597217/ (see table of contents)
Back in 1998, I was working with a friend on a website that was going to astonish the world called "ClickOn2Chichester". (Sarcasm aside, the idea wasn't a bad one: 1. Build a kind of directory website for the city in which we lived. 2. Use that site to demonstrate to local businesses that we could also build websites for them. 3. Point out that we could drive traffic to their new website by linking to it from our city directory website. I've still got the files for CO2C somewhere. The mashed-up HTML/CSS would make a modern dev cry.)
We wanted to be able to show our city directory site to potential customers, so we needed a laptop. My friend had some inheritance money, so he bought an orange Clamshell iBook (I seem to remember that they cost about £1600, which was a lot of money in the late 1990's).
The display resolution on the Clamshell may have been only 800 x 600, but it was as sharp as a pin, especially when running System 9.2 with its boxy, rectangular menus and windows. The keyboard was good as well, with a similar feel to the much-loved 'Wall Street' and 'Pismo' G3 Powerbooks (and in my grumpy, middle-aged opinion, far better than the hardly-any-travel chiclet keys on today's machines).
At the time, 300MHz was not considered 'slow'. In fact, we enhanced the website with Apple's "QuickTime Virtual Reality" software; we'd put a camera on a tripod, pan the camera so that it took a photo every 45 degrees, get the film developed and printed, scan those 8 photos into the laptop, and then import them into QTVR which would convert them into a "Google Street View"-style panorama that we could upload to the site. Pretty advanced stuff for 1998.
And then we invited a third guy to join our little venture. I won't mention names as this is a public searchable website, but let's just say that things weren't quite the same after that. "Third guy" wanted to borrow the iBook from my friend—but instead of carrying it in the boring, black, well-padded IBM laptop case that we'd bought to protect the machine, he insisted on putting it into his cool trendy ethnic satchel with its dodgy, fraying shoulder strap that was held together with knots. Needless to say the inevitable happened: the shoulder strap un-knotted itself, the satchel hit the tarmac and the screen on the iBook was cracked.
Not long after that, friendships began to fray, and I went my own way. But I'll always have a soft spot for the old Clamshell iBook. They weren't the 'toy' machines that some people imagine them to be.
By donating your unwanted office furniture and tech through the Business2Schools charity we are able to make state schools in the UK an even better experience for children and students.
If we help improve the infrastructure in schools, provide them with faster computers and help create a more aspirational environment, our children will be inspired. If we are more ethical about recycling our children will benefit.
Kylin OS is China's Ubuntu-style, "open source" operating system...
...but with a copyright notice attached.
https://handwiki.org/wiki/images/thumb/f/f7/Kylin_OS.png/1200px-Kylin_OS.png
The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive, but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities.
All three dark triad traits are conceptually distinct although empirical evidence shows them to be overlapping. They are associated with a callous–manipulative interpersonal style.
• Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy.
• Machiavellianism is characterized by the manipulation and exploitation of others, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest.
• Psychopathy is characterized by continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits (CU), and remorselessness.
High scores in these traits have been found to statistically increase a person's likelihood to commit crimes, cause social distress, and create severe problems for organizations, especially if they are in leadership positions. They also tend to be less compassionate, agreeable, empathetic, and satisfied with their lives, and less likely to believe they and others are good.
@therobyouknow: I have a friend who works for the BBC World Service. He told me years ago about a new technology that would digitally encode radio broadcasts on the AM band, combining very distant reception with much better quality. I'd completely forgotten about it until I read your post. Unfortunately, it seems as though it didn't make much of an impact in Europe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=digital+radio+mondiale
That's the first thing that occurs to me when people make the "environmentally friendly" argument: What about the hundreds of thousands of junked FM radios?
P.S. I was curious about your CR-800; what a fabulous looking tuner! I have a 1980s Toshiba radio cassette in the kitchen.
> It ran like a 3 legged dog with its naggers caught in a vice
Back in 1993 or 1994, I discovered that my university was offering WordPerfect for Windows and Quattro Pro for Windows to students for £80—which was still a lot of money in 1993, but a hell of a lot cheaper than full retail price. So I paid my money, and took the software boxes (Boxes! With disks & manuals!) back to my digs.
Quattro Pro wasn't too bad at all (image). But as for the main attraction, WordPerfect 5.2.... oh dear. It was clunky, slow, and bloody ugly (image). My heart sank! :-(
P.S. The article mentions Pete Peterson's book "Almost Perfect", about his time as CEO at the company. It's a good read. If anyone's interested, Pete has made it available for free to either read on his site or to download as a PDF: https://wepeterson.com/almostperfect/
LUXURY! In our house, we had to get up 10 minutes before we went to bed, build our own computer from bits scavenged from the skip behind Dixons, write our own device drivers in QL Basic, assemble and link the kernel using Esperanto — and if the machine didn’t work, our dad would thrash us with a PDP-11.
I thought I knew about the Julian Assange case. Then I read an interview with Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture...
Republik: "A murderous system is being created before our very eyes"
I would humbly ask anyone who also feels that they understand what's happening to please take the time and read this article.
"We asked the Pi team for a list of NVMe drives tested and will update the piece if we receive a response."
Jeff Geerling has just released a video about the M.2 HAT+. He mentions the drives that he successfully tested with it...
YouTube: It's time to ditch microSD [8 mins, 54 secs]
Thank you AC. I found the article to which you referred...
Birmingham City Council’s Oracle implementation explained: What went wrong?
Good grief. I didn't realise just how deep the problems went on this one.
Forgive my ignorance, but could somebody briefly explain why these councils feel the need to spend an eye-watering sum of money to switch from a (presumably) working SAP system to a start-again-from-the-ground-up Oracle system?
I mean.... why embark on this fraught journey, when they could have just stuck with what (I presume) had been working well?
The great leap in processor speed, thermal performance and battery life happened with the transition from Intel to M1. The jumps to M2 and M3 were nowhere near as large.
I suspect that many people are perfectly satisfied with the performance of their M1 processors and aren't tempted to upgrade.
The best solution (IMO) to the sprawling Linux filesystem was implemented in GoboLinux.
Its creators re-mapped the entire structure so that there are only 5 sub-directories in root: "Files", "Mount", "Programs", "Systems" and "Users". Each application gets its own dedicated sub-directory within "Programs", so there's no need for a package manager at all. The directory structure is the package manager.
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