Posts by Mage 9860 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
Yes, hence reversing 48 in 1948. It was about Authoritarianism in 1948.
Animal Farm was more directly about USSR version of Communism perverting socialism. The behaviour of Soviet backed groups in the Spanish Civil War caused a big shift in his outlook.
I prefer Mate, but I have XFCE, IceWm and Cinnamon also installed om most Mint. I also have Mate on the Distro on the RPi4b, which doesn't have Mint.
I use a very non-standard theme on Mate and screen sizes from a less than HD 11″ to a pair of 27″ 4K HDR with an optional 3rd HD o/p for a DVB-T modulator.
Applications which us QT badly (Viber) or do their own theme ignoring the system GUI entirely are annoying (Disks rather than GParted, or Mozilla anything, or any Web browser). There are a lot of arrogant idiots when it comes to GUIs.
BC, BD, BF = European (small signal, power and RF).
2N = USA
2S = Japan. Second letter, A, B.,C etc for kind of transistor
Diodes
BA = European
1N = USA
1S = Japan
Europe: A= Germanium, B = Silicon
Japan/USA : 1= diodes, 2 = Transiistors and 3 = dual gate
The BC10x parts were metal TO18. There are identical parts current in TO92 (plastic) and SOT (SMD), but typically BC3xx numbers.
Nuvistors were and are very expensive, though some work to UHF. Only used domestically in USA VHF/UHF mains equipment. The Russian Rod Pentodes were military use and an older design, larger but more efficient, they are good to VHF. Only one non-military set, a forestry radio used Rod pentodes, Used in Mig, Sputnik and other satellites and better than Germanium transistors except for audio power stages. Also 6V to 48V input HT power supplies used Germanium audio power transitors in some western 1950s valve car radios and in Russian Rod Pentode based gear.
The acorn valves were from late 1930s VHF and quickly obsolete in WWII as they were too difficult to make.
Ukraine has vast stocks of Russian Rod Pentode valves. Produced from early 1950s up till 1991. The 1j24b is cheap in bulk and very long life on a 1.2V filament supply. About 48V HT would work. Only 11mA per filament. Can be wired as triodes or pentodes. The 1N60 came out in 1946 and the modern version is still made and cheap. Use it instead of any diode valves, though a Rod Pentode can do that too.
Not for years. Trading on past reputation. Maybe the professional products are good.
Philips Audio & TV was split and now just labels on two Asian companies. Now they really only do lighting and grooming. Like before 1928. Semiconductors spun off.
Sony was once a big innovator 1956 to maybe 2006.
TCL are now better than Sony.
TCL have quite a few brands and maybe have always made Alcatel phones.
Sony now has little of interest other than the Playstation for years. They messed up on many technologies with stupid restrictions due to becoming a media company. Last Sony TV I had died in 3 months and insisted on encrypting entire HDD plugged in (only FTA). Unlike a €45 setbox which simply records TS files as-is on any FAT32 storage.
They crippled minidisc players, CD root "malware", proprietary memory cards, killed Linux on one of the Playstations.
So how big team of people does she manage?
No-one needs Outlook for email, that's only needed for corporate meetings scheduling and Exchange.
No-one needs One note.
Hardly anyone needs Word, unless they are sharing for edit the same doc with co-workers.
There are a few niche things Excel does that LO Calc doesn't have. Charts/graph creation & CSV import is better on LO Calc
All earlier versions of MS stuff with no AI are better, and even on Office 2002 and later the Office Assistant was an option install for Custom.
I don't care about the MS store, only running older Windows programs where there is no Linux alternative. Many of these don't work on ANY 64 bit Windows and many will never have updates, in some cases because the author is dead.
I always installed a 32 bit Wine first as I have no 64 bit Windows programs except what came with Windows 10. I have VMs for XP, Win7 & Win10, but Virtual box dropped Direct 3D on XP and the VM overhead is high compared to WINE. My 11" Linux "laptop" hasn't enough RAM for VMs and seems unwilling to run even an XP VM (which can run in much less RAM than Win7 & later). No Guest Utils for Win98.
So WINE is handy for a handful of old programs. I did get an Office 2003 & 2007 cheap to try on WINE, but for my needs even the last OO that ran on Wiin98 is better and current LO Office is fine. The VM XP is used occasionally, and Win7 VM only for iTunes (not since iPhone 6 given away) and an LED badge.
No-one should need this. All the so called AI stuff should be off by default (as should many things such as uPNP, telemetry, news, weather etc) with a single control panel for settings with a decent UI.
Windows settings and and GUI has gone downhill since Windows 2000. The System management console (XP and later?) has never worked properly. Win 10 settings are an abomination. I have a real firewall. Why does it ignore turning off notifications for disabling it and other stuff? Nag Nag Nag.
Windows NT 3.x was nothing like Window 3.x except in appearance.
Windows CE.
Windows Phone Edition
Unrelated versions to each other of Windows Embedded.
Windows on ARM originally didn't run Windows 86 programs.
Windows Millennium Edition (really a broken Windows 9x) is a completely different thing to Windows 2000 (Really NT 5.0)
Original Windows XP 64 bit was for Itanium. DIdn't run on x86-64 CPUs. Quite short lived,
All the stupid versions of Windows for desktop, when there should only be a Workstation and a Server edition. Don't buy a "Home" edition of anything by MS. Professional editions of MS Office have stuff no-one professional should use (MS Access and MS Powerpoint).
Windows 9x should only have been packaged with games console hardware, never sold to businesses. It killed the Pentium Pro.
Explorer as a desktop shell, a file Manager and also Internet Explorer. Stupid naming overload. Only the filemanager should have been called Explorer. Also on Win9x the IE6.0 integrates to File Explorer and "breaks" delete. Solution is to roll back to IE 5.5.
Intel naming went mad with Pentium & Celeron & Atom. Or i3, i5, i7 etc.
DELL repeating model names for unrelated models and then search is unable to return the stuff for older ones, such as Inspirion 7500
Lenovo and Samsung model names.
All copying the stupidity of car makers. See Escort, Cortina (Ford) or Golf, Polo (VW).
Everything should do this by default.
Some programs do and some don't on my Mate Desktop (Mint) which looks a bit Win2K to Server 2003 style.
Programs that ignore the system and do their own (usually stupid) style of scrollbars, tabs, checkboxes, menu etc are REALLY Annoying, like current Thunderbird, Firefox, "Disks" and Viber.
I have bars on three sides that autohide:
Top is menu, terminal, kill, System info/Windows list
Bottom is workspaces, shutdown, lock, logout, taskbar icons, time-date etc.
Left is "quick launch" of Local programs
Right isn't autohide, so as to not mess up a 2nd screen (because hide stupidly moves the places bar rather than collapsing it) and is quick launch of Remote stuff,, such as email, browsers, packages, filezilla, PuTTY, connect to Server etc.
You can't make your OS/Desktop be fully "spatial". Some programs are ill behaved.
WFW311 was easier to use than Win10. OK, no start menu or pinned icons and no right click context menu. Win32s even runs some 32 bit Windows programs. They deliberately added some APIs on Win95 for Office 95 to stop people running Office 95 on WFW/Win 3.1x. It made it fail on NT 3.5, so we got a free upgrade to NT 3.51. Not sure if everyone did. There was an Explorer Shell preview for NT 3.51 and you could run NT 32 bit FileManager on NT4.0 instead of using Explorer Shell File Explorer, which still is maddening.
It's MS destroying windows is the only thing. Then the companies that produce windows only business software doing Linux versions. Linux devs & promoters can't do anything, In reality Linux has been fine to replace Windows for 10 to 15 years. The issue is companies that develop Windows only programs for businesses, not anything about Linux, which has been better than Vista, Win 7, Win8, win 10 or 11, maybe since Vista.
A bit like Scottish Independence. That depends more on Westminster really annoying people in Scotland, not anything any politician in Scotland can do.
Capacitive touch had existed in the late 1980s. Data was expensive so smart phones (since 1998) were for business use. They deliberately chose stylus and resistive to get higher resolution so that signatures and notes would work. A tile GUI was trivial.
Apple iPhone succeeded due to cheap contract data tarriff and phone bundled together and for browsing, not information creation. Hence no copy/paste originally. I and others back then (from 2000 for me) paid per second connect time or per Mbyte data used. But the company paid. Hence it was a success for the public.
We don't owe MS and IBM either. The choice of crippled 8088 (even the 8086 wasn't a proper 16 bit CPU) and 86 clone of CP/M held back personal computing / small businesses by nearly 10 years. Win 9x should have only been a dedicated game console, not for PCs, as we already had NT 3.5 from MS. Win9x was a disaster in small business.
I used Apple II, Act Sirus 1, CP/M S100 & RM380Z, Tandy, Pet, Acorn etc. I played with a Xerox Alto in a Xerox showroom. I've read about Lilith. I used a Cromemco Cromix server in mid 1980s. Also DR MultiDos, Gem, Xenix and Minix. Did IT training, support and programming for nearly 20 years.
We owe a lot to people like Alan Kay and others. Not to essentially marketing companies like Apple or monopolists like MS or IBM.
Especially true with the stupid UK scheme which means everyone "over age" loses privacy.
Privacy for everyone is the loss of most of these schemes. The Site owner, government and criminals will all get the personal info. A rise in impersonations, arrests and phising.
This has been updated.
Story maybe over 10 years old.
https://www.corvidspress.com/fiction/otherworld-series/no-silver-lining/
“If an in-house system fails, only one bank, or one retailer or one supplier is affected,” insisted Louise. “If everything is outsourced to the Cloud, even if it’s a hundred times more reliable it’s an apocalyptically bad event because you lose everything at once. There are too few cloud providers, who are too similar and too big.”
The 4mm plugs are mere children, only dating from about mid 1920s and still used. The approximately 1/8″ wander plug must be older, but it's gone out of use. It was used on pre-WWII battery radios and up to 1960s for aerial, earth etc on radios.
The 75 ohm BNC is now rare compared to 50 Ohm. The 75 Ohm N is still used on some specialist cable broadband gear. You can connect an N plug to BNC plug using a "barrel". The inner bits of N are similar. TNC seems very rare now.
Only historically because you could easily use transformers. At large size they are efficient and long life. Before high voltage semiconductors one solution to DC was simply a motor driving a dynamo (WWII rotary converters/ dynamotors) or an alternator. At lower power 6V or 12V DC to 200V DC (Valve car radios) the vibrator pack was used. Basically an oscillating relay and transformer. Rectification was either by metal rectifier, valve rectifier, or an extra pair of contacts on the vibrator pack as a synchronous rectifier (now done with FETs in SMPSUs). Vibrator packs are short lived compared to dynamotors.
There is less loss with high voltage DC than high voltage AC as AC is more affected by inductance and capacitance. AC also has skin effect, but it's likely negligable at 50Hz or 60Hz.
The DC incidentally means the two grids don't need synchronised.
The high power over long distances is due to high voltage, not AC.
Maybe 50 years ago there was optimism about superconductors.
Um, no.
BSD release 1978
"The Last One" 1981, and it wasn't cheap or open source.
Admittedly actual GNU is 1983 and later.
Also loads of free CP/M SW in various senses from about 1976
UNIX would have been "foss" only AT&T in a sense "stole" it, which gave the impetus for BSD and later.
Vibe coding that doesn't code would be a much better idea. Stuff that suggests where to start, what to learn, and helps build an environment where you can get results that quickly and clearly depend on discovering and trying out ideas. These tools exist already. They're called books. They're called tutorials.
Also people need to concentrate on learning to analyse, logical thinking, how to document, what framework / library features work in the real world as opposed to looking good. How to be programmer, not a programming language.
A good programmer can master any arbitrary new language in days. Figuring out the libraries and system APIs etc might take months. Vibe is a solution for a problem that in reality doesn't exist for real projects managed and implemented by experts. It's a toy for the naive newcomer of less value than Scratch. It's an illusion.
The Expert systems were expensive to produce because they used expensive human experts for the human curated data. They are not flexible and limited to one narrow field. They were not wasteful of computer resources, water and electricity.
An LLM / Generative AI is using randomly scraped info with no human curation. They seem far more natural, but are not the same at all and are totally untrustworthy.
No, it's not, unless you are very naive.
It only seems more impressive than Eliza because it's been fed the Internet's content and also scanned books (neither of which is fair use). Eliza was static with the responses in the code. The LLMs are using a distributed database (the so-called Neural Networks are not simulations or copies of biological brain structures), Almost all the marketing and PR is a lie.
Some people thought Eliza was impressive. It's in Linux emacs; type emacs in a terminal and then Esc x doctor (no spaces)
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
How do I turn off AI?
What do you think?
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