Posts by isdnip 133 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2024
I have heard that the company, and the name, date back to the 1970 when it was the Santa Cruz Operation of Vidar, a pioneering digital telephone switch manufacturer. Vidar was originally owned by Continental Telephone, then a US rural telco holding company, and they sold it to TRW, the military conglomerate. Vidar's switch business didn't do that well but the Santa Cruz folks were doing something with Unix, so it became its own company.
This is a big difference between English and American law. Under English law, the loser pays the lawyers. This is good in theory but also means that a big corporation can hire top-price solicitors and barristers and put the plaintiff at risk of paying a very large bill if the case loses. Under American law, each side pays its own lawyers unless the judge rules that the plaintiff was way out of line, in which case the defendant can try to ask for legal fees (IANAL so I don't know the details). And the original defendant can sometimes countersue.
The golf course is on the mainland, in West Palm Beach. Merde-a-Lardo is in Palm Beach, on a barrier island. The county jail is across the street from the golf course. So is an elementary school. Merde-a-Lardo, though, might be a good dumping ground for remnants of Trump's planned statuary, after he is done and gone.
In other words, the big names now are building the IBM 370 mainframes of AI, early 1970s style, while the Chinese are building both their own mainframes and some very useful PDP-11s, which will take away much of the market that doesn't need the big iron. And that will eventually give way to PCs killing the minicomputer market. Only this cycle is software so it will happen faster than it did with hardware.
Actually, at this point, "US law" is almost an oxymoron. Other than petty crimes committed by commoners, to fill the prisons, law in the US seems to have been replaced by a system of payments to a certain crime family originally from Queens, now based in the lawless land of Floriduh.
But why? The NT kernel is the strongest point in Windows. It's essentially a reimplementation of VMS; David N Cutler did "v1" of both. Windows went awry when the GDI was moved into kernel space, in the 4.0 time frame, in order to run a little faster, and it lost more reliability when the HAL went away and all the drivers moved into the kernel, again for speed. But those were product management decisions that abused the kernel, not underlying faults. Part of what has hurt Windows over the years is a serious lack of quality assurance and control; MS could do low quality work on top of a Linux kernel too.
Because there is a huge ecosystem of Windows applications, especially on the desktop. Linux is strongest as a server and as a developer desktop; muggle users are usually better off in Windows. And in many (most?) businesses, Microsoft Office, or 365, or whatever they're calling it these days, is still the standard for document and spreadsheet production, and it doesn't run well (if at all) on Linux. Nor do the Linux office suites interwork perfectly with it.
Maybe these enhancements will help the Unix/Linux crew feel a little better when they have to work on or support a Windows system.
Pineapple on pizza is perfectly good. Tomato and pineapple are both fruits, both semi-tart and sweet. Foil-wrapped potatoes, on the other hand, are a crime against nature. I have no idea why anyone would do such a thing, ruining the best and only healthy part of a potato, the skin.
Pandora Mail looks a lot like Eudora; it's a pretty good attempt to be what Eudora could have been had it stayed alive. I don't use it, though, because T'bird integrated calendar too, and handles invites sent to me nicely. That would be an external program with Pandora. Also, Pandora is not free; you pay for it, and each major version upgrade requires a new payment. Ugh. You'd think Broadcom owned them.
IP networks don't respect national borders; many are corporate, and a multinational corporation's network will span them. One of the drafts leading up to IPv6 did have national prefixes, and it went nowhere. Also note that telephone numbers have a 1, 2, or 3 digit country code, and what happens with the remaining digits (max total 15) is up to that country. Canada has 10-digit phone numbers behind code 1 but 14-digit numbers are being introduced for non-voice IoT. The US will follow if the FCC has half a brain about it.
This IPv8 proposal is less dumb than IPv6, but that's like saying that Iceland is warmer than Greenland. The whole TCP/IP architecture is past its sell-by date. RINA (ISO 4396) is an easier fix, as it can be worked in to any layer and encapsulate any embedded applications or networks unchanged. But it is too mind-blowingly simple for the IP crowd.
Those are states with the highest poverty rates -- percentage of the population below the poverty line. New York is not poor, just very unequal, and it's unlikely that low wages would attract many employees there. But such wages might seem a king's ransom in some of the other states.
In any case, chatbots are useless. Comcast has one answering its service line. I called about my subscription to their Peacock TV service. The chatbot responded with the default "many problems can be solved by restarting your cable box". The equivalent of "reboot your PC" for ISP problems. Getting a human took time, and eventually got me someone in the Philippines.
That's basically true about XP, but it's not uncommon for the first release version of software to be, well, an unannounced beta test. Lots of applications came out for "Windows XP SP1 or later". But after SP1 it was pretty solid. And 7 was pretty solid. 10 isn't bad but 11 seems like another iteration of ME/Vista/8, the B-team version.
11's default task bar breaks by trying to look like a Mac. Taking out the text and just having icons may be pretty but some of us read the text better than we decipher the icons, and when we have multiple windows of the same task open, it's easier to see them next to each other in 10. MS still has a bad case of Apple envy and doesn't realize that not everyone loves their UI.
I tried it on Windows Firefox 147. It works -- the two sides both work as expected. However, when you un-split, the remaining tabs are still small. You can slide the split tab to the side to make it use most of the screen but there's always a gap from the missing split view. So a bit is left to do.
Well, technically in the US an ISP is not a carrier, though many carriers own ISPs. But it is still the ISP's job to move bits unless they have a reason not to (a true carrier can't choose). Telnet was originally used for remote logins, but who does that any more? Still, the protocol machine is useful, and may well be inside a lot of IoT-type devices for machine to machine communications.
The proposed rules are quite hard for devices to meet. The interference doesn't come from cell phones, which are low power. It's from the base stations, which are allowed many kilowatts of EIRP. The oldest RAs were crap and the 3.7-3.98 GHz base stations were plenty far away. But 4.16 GHz is dangerously close and will likely need a whole new RA design.
Of course this is all vital to US national security, because the extra spectrum is needed to Win The 6G Race. If we lose it, then, say the advocates, we will need to learn to talk Chinese, and McDonalds will be replacing the Big Mac with subgum chicken chow mein. What's a few billion for airplane upgrades to save America from losing to China? Plus knocking some small CATV providers off the air, since the6 GHz band being taken away is used for channel feeds.
I agree that Thunderbird is about as good a client as there is, though its fork Betterbird has some modest advantage. (That's just a recent T'bird ESR with some tweaks that BB's author thinks they should have made, so he makes them. An advantage of open source, and this works on Windows too.)
However, MZLA is a bit flaky organizationally. They had a really beautiful product in T'bird 102, then blew it up bigly in v115, "Supernova", which was released when it was really pre-alpha quality. But the latest v140 range is pretty stable. Not as good as 102 but they messed with the config files so you can't go back.
And we Americans don't benefit from the privacy laws that Europeans have, so the private entities have more access to our material here. Another reason "Leave mail on server and delete after 14 days" with POP makes more sense than relying on IMAP on somebody's server.
Yes, definitely fix the server. So ask Google if you can patch GMail. Or ask yahoo if you can patch theirs. Or ask your mail service provider if you can build your own server version because you don't like the one they maintain.
But if you're the guru who runs a private server and rebuilds it from sources and customizes it as you see fit, fine, you IMAP on your private server the way you like it. The other 99.999999 percent of us will have to make do with server behavior as it exists.
Of course POP3 understands which mails *this specific device* has downloaded before. A decent POP3 client, like Thunderbird, associates each message with a unique ID which is also on the server, so it only fetches the ones *that device* doesn't yet have. I run POP3 on multiple clients and it works like a charm. The server doesn't even care if it has been downloaded before; that's a client function.
Minor aside: The old (>20years dead) Eudora Worldmail server implemented an extension wherein the server *did* keep track of whether a message had been downloaded at least once, and the Eudora client, as well as the KMail client, noted it, so you'd download mail and see if it's entirely new or just new to that client. That was essentially an extension based on an IMAP capability.
In general, though, IMAP sucks the big one! In theory, the protocol is capable of doing everything you want. But I've never met a decent implementation of the protocol. Instead, T'bird and everybody else ONLY supports using IMAP as a "sync" protocol, a cheaper version of the Lotus/Microsoft corporate mail model where everything is always on The Server and the client is just a viewport and IT is in control. That is not inherent in the protocol but if you like keeping local copies, then IMAP on T'bird is not your choice. In theory you can copy the sync'd mail to a Local Folder for keepsies but doing that through a filter is not reliable, just hit-or-miss copying some but not all messages.
And Yahoo, heavily enshittified, nowadays limits its IMAP server to seeing only the last 10,000 message; older one are on the web mail site and ironically can be pulled down via POP.
A lot of history "can't be used for anything" except to showcase the past. Which is useful. But frankly it seems like the regime is more intent on destroying anything having to do with science, at least what the tech bros don't value. Science is the enemy when RFKJr is giving medical advice.
I'm not a programmer, but back in the '70s I did write some code for the systems of the day, like RSX-11M and VMS. Memory was expensive. What may be forgotten was that in those days, the compile stage was followed by a link stage, wherein the linking loader incorporated into the executable only those system or library routines that it needed. If the code wasn't used, it wasn't linked in. It seems to me that the problem nowadays is that there are big libraries and they're brought in whole, rather than only the parts in use. Isn't that what a good linker handled? Why was that forgotten? Or am I just making stuff up?
Well, no.
It is cheaper to buy RAM than to optimize software that will be used in a narrow application, like in house, or for some obscure market. But when we're talking about schytt that goes out as part of an OS package to hundreds of millions of users, then a little effort done by the developers will have a big payoff worldwide. And we know that the big devs don't do that.
Stories I heard, which may or may not have truth to them, say that before Unix was in C, it included a language B, which itself was based on BCPL. TENEX (which became TOPS-20) was written in BCPL, which was as pretty nice totally-untyped language that was popular on DEC hardware, at least in 36-bit-land. Does anyone know if that bit about B was at all true or just made up?
There was a case that got pretty good publicity this fall about a woman transiting from Mexico to Canada at LAX. La Migra arrested her and kept her in one of their dungeons for a while before pressure got her let out. Their excuse was that they didn't think she was really in transit and planned to work illegally in California. You know, arrest on pre-crime, even though she had a ticket out.
FWIW, Trump's real esnake career was failing and he got famous again when Mark Burnett cast him as the tycoon on The Apprentice (Warren Buffett wasn't interested). Burnett had struck it rich pitching a version of Europe's Robinson Island to US TV, who called it Survivor. Burnett was English. He had vacationed in Mexico and had a transit stop in Los Angeles. He didn't get on the plane home, and snuck out and found work in LA even though he was an "illegal alien". But he was white so he wasn't deported. And come to think of it, Malaria herself was working illegally in the US when Trump picked her to replace Marla.
The $100M endowed Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC, https://www.ardc.net ), a foundation that operates very transparently. "Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) is a private foundation that exists to support amateur radio and digital communication science and technology. We do this through making grants (including support for scholarship programs and research & development projects) and managing 44Net." They give out project grants and scholarships. Grantees are expected to follow open source guidelines for any code they produce. A lot of the individuals involved, on committees or management, are folks who were doing amateur packet radio back in the 1980s.
That was a story that a fake story about a pardon went out, and he wanted a pardon, but he didn't get one. Apparently he gave too much money to Democrats.
But the British authorities caught a Chinese thief because she chose the wrong country to hide in. Had she hid in the US, then Trump would probably have welcomed her to Merde-a-Lardo.
Windows 10 updates are preventable -- in the Pro version, not Home. I don't run updates until I'm damned well ready to, and it's always a) well after the crowds have found the major failures (which get reported on El Reg), and b) a reboot won't be too inconvenient, given that I keep many processes running at once.
But their quality has remained poor, getting worse. Especially Office, which is the standard for revisable document sharing and collaboration. (So please don't tell me to use Libre.) A couple of months ago, I was editing something in Word and it disappeared. Not just the Word window, but Office itself. It suddenly and completely de-installed itself. This is on a subscription version of 365, paid up. I had to reinstall and fix a bunch of settings again. Then a couple of weeks ago, I was editing a big document in Word and it crashed. And in doing so deleted the file I had been working on. No backup or anything; it just killed the entire file. So a couple of days' work lost. And whose idea was it to take away the vertical scroll bar three seconds after you stop moving it? Excel lately is no prize either. Enshittification rules.
Nobody can answer this question: What benefits, other than "support", does Windows 11 bring to users compared to Windows 10?
The problem is that there aren't any, at least not obviously. Instead it's more enshittified and more bloated with spyware. It's a downgrade, not an upgrade. Windows 10 is pretty stable (so was 7), so not getting support doesn't mean much, at least if you take reasonable firewalling precautions and don't click on spam attachments.
So I'm sticking with 10
Well, no, the problem is that I know about things about IPv6 you don't. It's the Children's Crusade Protocol -- it is a test of the hard-core faithful, willing to follow a stupid committee into oblivion because of their imaginary authority, even though it makes no sense if you think about it beyond the obvious "but don't we all need globally-unique IP addresses?"
Friends don't let friends use IPv6. As Americans know from a beer commercial, it tastes worse and is more filling.
IPv6 was invented over 30 years ago, before the Internet was public, by a "B team" at IETF who did not really understand what they were doing, but instead were ripsschitt that IAB had previously selected TUBA as the next IP. TUBA came from DEC via the OSI committee, and was thus tainted by the eevilll OSI, even though in fact it wasn't the bad part of OSI. So they came up with a v6 that anyone who understood networking would discard immediately. Not that the PIP and SIPP drafts that merged into it were any better.
CGNAT gets blocked because blockheads don't understand security and victimize the innocent.
And the "OSI 7 layer stack" has nothing to do with TCP/IP, and is a poor way to look at networking. Oh, and they did away with layers 5 and 6 after the textbooks came out. But folks who like to cite the fact of a 7 layer model never understand what the Session and Presentation layers did, or were for, but were happy to quote a one-line summary from the original model document. (Hint: They were a mistake to be treated as layers; they're now optional application layer functions.)
I've never used Outlook but one of my business partners who does, or did until this week, said that they've essentially discontinued the client. Instead the new version retains the mail on their server and is little more than a front end to web mail. Thus MS has to have the passwords to your various mail accounts. Sorry, no thanks, and hello Thunderbird! (I've been using that for a long time anyway, and by now it's fairly usable again, after the abominable v115 "Supernova" explosion.)
Office 365 is a sloppy mess. I don't know if it's intentional enshittification or they just have lost control over decades of badly-documented spaghetti code. Office 2010 still works and is more stable; that may have been its high point. The one real advantage to 365 is that Excel has a much improved lookup function. When the program bothers to run. And I HATE that opening a file when there are already open windows in that app causes an old window to open too. There used to be a workaround or two but they've patched them out, ensuring that the bug always manifests.
They have zero chance of getting a legal (at least in the US, probably also in most countries) replacement for the radio blobs, for sure.
The cell phone modems are SDRs; the real work is in the firmware (blobs). The 3GPP (GSM is obsolete) standards are incredibly complex. The cellular bands are licensed, and the licenses belong to the carriers, and the radio are covered by the carrier licenses because they're tested to follow the standards which put them under the control of the base stations. A "free" phone could violate those terms, even if it could produce both the 3GPP-speciifc protocol code and do the DSP behind it (again, mostly in the SDR blobs).
Then there's the Wi-Fi. Again, rules dictate that these unlicensed transmitters be approved via testing at an authorized lab, with their firmware. So sure, there are routine updates, but the radio blobs are left conformant. A FOSS Wi-Fi driver would thus not be authorized and could not be legally sold or used. While the Wi-Fi specs aren't as complex as 5G, they're not trivial. In the US, the FCC does not care about the 802.11 specs, but they are very serious about what power levels can be transmitted on what frequency. It's not legal in the US to even sell a Wi-Fi (or other unlicensed 5 GHz) device that allows the country code to be changed away from "US/Canada". "RoW" is always a separate SKU.
Free software is a nice-sounding ideology but there are real-world concerns that it doesn't always line up with.
Fusion will be ready in 20 years. This was true 50 years ago and it's still true today, and is likely to be true 20 years from now. It does, however, provide work for physicists, and allows power-wasting data center owners to claim they're investing in something that will eventually power their data centers, for some large value of eventually.
Everyone knows that AI is a bubble; the question is what happens when the bubble bursts.
The real money is being made by those who supply the money-losing AI companies. So NVidia and Oracle, among others, are selling to them, but their customers' ability to buy from them hinges on being sustainable. Given OpenAI's revenue model, that seems somewhat doubtful.
The best case for such suppliers would be like what happened in the California gold rush. Lots of prospectors showed up. Most did not strike it rich. Levi Strauss, however, did, selling them pants (trousers, for you Brits). After the gold rush, people still needed clothes. But will anyone need all of those data centers? I think the British sense of "pants" has a more appropriate meaning here but I'm a gringo so I can't be sure.
