* Posts by Mage

9265 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007

Remember AMD, Xilinx were merging? Shareholders give thumbs up to $35bn deal

Mage Silver badge
Coat

I hope it doesn't hurt Xilinx!

How is Intel's takeover of Altera doing?

Over a decade on, and millions in legal fees, Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle in Java API legal war

Mage Silver badge

Re:OS gig from IBM because they pitched Xenix (Unix on a Micro)

No, it was a DOS that ran Wordstar and supercalc that attracted IBM. They wanted minimalist. The original PC had no graphics, no realtime clock, no HDD (Xenix would have needed an HDD) and the Floppy was even then not only priced separately but only 360K. The 8" drives were 1M then and other companies had higher capacity 5.25" floppies.

I could be wrong, but Xenix was brain dead on an 8088, though it existed in 1980. It needed a 286 to be at all viable. Minimum was the later XT (a HDD)

IBM didn't want competition with "real computers" hence choosing the 8088 and calatogue parts. IBM had a choice of real 16 bit CPUS and real OSes and deliberately chose MS-DOS. IBM did buy Xenix from MS for other products.

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: What does Microsoft think?

Actually MS simply bought it from a company that ripped off CP/M 86. It was far more than the interface. CP/M 86 was easy to produce from the 8080 CP/M (later called CP/M 80) because the 8088 / 8086 wasn't a real 16 bit CPU. It used 64 K blocks and segment registers. Very similar to 8080 / 8085, so Intel had an assembler translator. Very little work to port say Supercalc or Wordstar from CP/M 80 to PC-DOS/MS-DOS.

They did base MS Basic on Dartmouth BASIC.

So MS original fortune based on two products, one a simple port and one a bought in knock-off.

Actually the Java issue was caused by the fact that full fat Desktop Java was essentially free but not allowed to be used AT ALL for Mobile. Symbian used a cut down licensed Mobile Java. Android was bought in by Google and Sun or Oracle refused to license the full version Java. So they had to write their own, and use Davik instead of the cross platform PC full JVM.

So Oracle has only themselves to blame.

IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos

Mage Silver badge

you can't kill UNIX

sudo kill -a

Probably not?

or

rm -r *

I've forgotten, though I'm old enough to remember MS selling Xenix for the 286 in the 1980s (rather more floppies to install than DOS and CDs were later) and the rather rare MS only OS/2 of 1989 which I encountered 1st hand in the 1990s.

We had a machine that loaded AT&T UNIX from tape.

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

AT&T's Unix and UnixWare

Bonkers.

Elephant in the room is that AT&T pinched the ownership from the universities. That's why BSD and GNU exists.

Redhat is now IBM. IBM is expert on litigation and IP. This will run till Xinuos is broke.

Director, deputy director, CTO of Free Software Foundation quit after Stallman installation

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: what exactly does RMS bring?

Nothing. He's become a parasite using it to binge out on conferences. He's well past his sell-by date and has contributed nothing useful for years.

Time for an upgrade: Dev of the last modern browser for PowerPC Macs calls it a day

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Thank-you

So sad that the Internet in terms of Web functionality is too complicated, too insecure, too lacking in privacy and we are almost down to two products, both with increasingly poorer GUIs and becoming more difficult to secure.

Cryptic US Strategic Command tweet reveals dangers of working from home with kids in the way

Mage Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Trigger warning in 3..2...1

Twitter is now part of USA National Security?

Do they launch ICBMs by coded tweet?

Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Mage Silver badge

Re: A (La)TeX user writes:

And most Word users don't know about Paragraph and Page styles.

Mage Silver badge
Coffee/keyboard

Ha!

Ha!

Oh, I'm glad it's not me.

(Should I delete the comma?)

Mac OS X at 20: A rocky start, but it got the fundamentals right for a macOS future

Mage Silver badge

486 PC, with Windows 3.1

Even NT 3.51 on a suitable 386 made Win 3.1 look stupid on a 486. Also did you have 32 bit disk drivers, a similar amount of RAM and a decent graphics card?

Also some 486 computers were slow.

We only used Win9x for games.

Win NT3.5 -> 3.51, 4, 2000 then Linux for Servers.

Workstations/laptops: WFWG3.11 with Win32S, 33 bit disk, -> NT 4.0 Workstation -> XP -> Linux.

In up till about 2006 some PCs/Laptops had WFWG3.11/Win95/XP/Linux multiboot using NT Boot.ini and a WFW/Win98 selection option after DOS 7.0

Mage Silver badge
Facepalm

Windows 95 – which combined

The article describes either NT4.0 or NT3.51 with the Preview of the explorer shell.

Win95 didn't initially have USB.

It didn't do 32 bits or multitasking any better than Windows For Workgroups 3.11 with 32 bit drivers, VFW etc. It added Direct X to allow easy porting of DOS games. NT had OpenGL, which didn't exist on Win95. Essentially WFWG 3.11 with an updated VFW and the 32 bit Wins and 32 bit drivers bundled. It wass still mostly 16 bits, so was massively slower on a Pentium Pro than NT3.51 or NT4.0

The comparison for OS X is NT 5.1, AKA Windows XP, and maybe for OS 9, NT 3.51 and NT 5.0 AKA Windows 2000.

Windows 95 had good driver support, the Explorer Desktop and the upgrade to Office 4.3. It loaded via booting DOS. It more seamlessly ran DOS games and the new DirectX ports from DOS.

By default it didn't have TCP/IP installed, but like WFWG 3.11, the NetBEUI.

The description of NextStep, OS9 and OSX sounds plausible. But not that of Win95. Win95 damaged NT workstation sales and OS/2 sales more than Mac, which by then outside the USA was a niche for publishing. Adobe Premiere Video Editing worked as well on Win 3.1 etc as Win95, and on win95 initially used win 3.x drivers and ISA cards for the video I/O.

Mac was in decline till MS gave a cash injection and people bought the original CRT all-in-one iMac due to hype. Apple's finances only turned around due to the iTunes per track deal with record companies and the iPod. Which initially was hard to connect to Win 9x.

Chrome 90 goes HTTPS by default while Firefox injects substitute scripts to foil tracking tech

Mage Silver badge
Devil

No, this is wrong

In fact Chrome doesn't work as described and not all sites need https.

In testing https and http versions of the same site it was impossible to access the http version, even if the https was subsequently broken. Also hiding the URL prefix in the stupid omnibox is also wrong.

Chrome development is driven by ideology, not actual usability, security or privacy. Privacy? It's practically Google spyware. An elephant in the room is how it does DNS and manages trackers and communication with Google.

Also it should be up to the rewrite rules on the site and the user input what to do, not some half baked algorithm put in by a programmer at Google's request.

Proof that Surface devices are not a niche product obsessed over by Microsoft fans: A patent lawsuit from Caltech

Mage Silver badge

Re:Qualcomm will not only sell you chips

Yes, and Qualcomm's behaviour should be illegal. They've bought companies and kill the products simply to own the IP. They are a patent troll that supports it by making chips.

Also ONLY copyright should apply to software and mathematics shouldn't be patentable.

Open Source Initiative board election results scrapped after security hole found, exploited to rig outcome

Mage Silver badge

Paper

Paper ballots cast by humans, counted by humans, who are watched by humans.

https://xkcd.com/2030/

and Bruce Schneier says the same.

They can be posted.

Richard Stallman says he has returned to the Free Software Foundation board of directors and won't be resigning again

Mage Silver badge

AT&T and UNIX

Universities paid for a lot of the work.

People at universities did a lot of the work.

Then AT&T aka Bell Labs insisted they 100% owned it. Thus was BSD and GNU born and later Linux Kernel.

To go extreme and suggest then that copyright shouldn't exist, and software, stories, music and images should be free would destroy the creation of them. The actual programmers, writers, musicians and artists should hold the copyright, not Corporations and not for more than a generation or two (25 or 50 years) after death. Not 75 or 90 or 100 years after death, and not cheating, like Disney does.

The Disney lobbying, increase of copyright terms and DRM hasn't benefited any creator or worker, only rich corporations.

example of Disney

The USPTO and US Government and big USA Corporations are the problem. Edison was one of the first to act like AT&T. Eventually his dishonest Cinema patents were invalidated. Far too late!

Apple stung for $308m in battle over patent used in FairPlay DRM software

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Oxymoron

Fair and DRM together is an oxymoron. DRM denies consumer rights in Copyright.

Only DRM providers benefit.

But there is ALSO a problem with patents being issued that shouldn't exist. Apple is serial abuser of the patent system enabled by USPTO stupidity.

WiMAX? 'Dead with no known users': Linux tips code in the recycle bin

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

4G?

Wimax, Flarion Flash OFDMA (bought and buried by Qualcomm for the 4G IP) as well as LTE were all "4G" back in 2007 etc.

It was obvious by 2009 that WiMax and Flash OFDMA were doomed. One Irish Wireless ISP switched to WiMax and it was just as poor as the earlier system because they used indoor modems with built in aerials at 3.5 GHz. To save on outdoor installations. Motorola Networks did the base stations.Then Motorola Networks were bought by Nokia Networks who had no interest in WiMax, nor had anyone else by then. Google bought the Moto Mobile Phone business for the IP, and Lenovo does the handsets. I think some Dell laptops had WiMax. Pointless.

Actually 5G above 2.6 GHz is about as pointless as 5.8 GHz WiFi or 3.5 GHz WiMax except in an open plan office or a stadium.

Machine learning devs, rejoice: You can now rent up to 16 Nvidia A100 GPUs on a single machine via Google

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Although that may solve the privacy issue

How?

This is nonsense! And what use are they blurred?

It's WORSE. More people involved looking at probably illegally obtained face images!

The entire operation is immoral.

Move aside, Technoking: All hail the Sweat Master and his many inspirational job titles

Mage Silver badge

Re: Hyphen

e'mail? That signifies a syllable break or something transliterated. You mean e’mail.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Hyphen

cow-orker

Space station dumps 2.9-ton battery pack to burn up in Earth's atmosphere after hardware upgrade

Mage Silver badge

Re: Rare Earths

so just leave it in the battery recycle box at the nearest supermarket.

Boffins revisit the Antikythera Mechanism and assert it’s no longer Greek to them

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Considering they were still using an Earth-centric model

Even if you suspected or proved a sun-centric solar system a clever box to show planets and moon as they are visible from earth or on a ship, would very likely put the Earth in the middle in an Earth-centric style. Star and planet computer simulators today start with an Earth based view.

'No' does not mean 'yes'... unless you are a scriptwriter for software user interfaces

Mage Silver badge
Flame

Two biggest GUI hates?

Check boxes that are unlabelled slide switches or flat buttons. For extra hate make them monochrome outlines with only O position to indicate state. also Buttons or labels as check boxes that don't label CURRENT state but state if tapped/clicked.

Modal windows with NO back, OK, Cancel or X, apparently you tap or click on the background. Who hired the idiots that decided on this.

For a while I thought Win 10 (binary for two?) was the worst since Windows 2.0 on Hercules or Hires CGA (basically also only 1 bit but less dots). But Android seems worse.

Mage Silver badge

Re: can't or ca'n't

forecastle

Fo'c's'le

Some people argue about the pronunciation. But it's been abbreviated so long it's pronounced folk'sill

We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether

Mage Silver badge

Re: 100001000100010001111001010

Or

11.001001000011111100110011001011100011000100110100001100010011010100111001001100100011011000110101001100110011010100111001

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: would last in perpetuity because the token is "in the blockchain"

And most ancient Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets. We've only read a fraction. Most are accounts, but there are stories.

And customer complaints which can be nearly as entertaining.

Mage Silver badge

Re: It just goes to show ...

Or

Trollope's "The way we live now" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now

Dickens' "Little Dorrit" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dorrit

Even possibly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Because it's just an obscenity when people are starving. There is no excess population. Just an excess greed problem.

Mage Silver badge

Obscene

See title

Memo to scientists. Looking for intelligent life? Have you tried checking for worlds with a lot of industrial pollution?

Mage Silver badge

nothing new here

Really the only feasible one is using the transit of a planet on its star to detect industrial gas emissions. Everywhere is too far away for radio, do the sums.

Indeed giant spheres and rings are probably just fantasy end of SF. James White's "Federation World" and Larry Niven's Ringworld. Niven had to have fantasy materials.

Also the scale is such that travel would need generation ships, robot probes or some kind of as yet unknown space folding star ship. Warp bubble drive is even less feasible than a ringworld. So there are no worries about invasions. By us or of use.

"Oumuamua, the first-known foreign interstellar object to visit the Solar System." No evidence whatsoever that it was fabricated. The likely explanation is a rock flung across space aeons ago by a natural collision.

Yes, we've known for decades what sort of signature a Dyson Sphere would have, The supposed three"levels" of energy utilisation/capture vs level of civilisation defined by Kardashev in 1964 are pure speculation. Really just plot fodder for SF. A really advanced civilisation might be argued to use less energy. The Kardashev scale and the two later additions reminds me of 1928 EE 'Doc' Smith's Skylark, because it's pure speculation. The start of Space Opera.

The Document Foundation updates LibreOffice Community to 7.1.1

Mage Silver badge
Headmaster

Versions

I've recently upgraded (not fresh install, which often was the only safe way on Windows) from Linux Mint 18.3 to Mint 20.1 as the support ends in April. The last 32 bit version is 19.3.

It comes with LO Version: 6.4.6.2, which seems fine. I'd manually upgraded via LO direct from 5.x something to LO 6.2.x while on Mint 18.3, both of those were fine.

I do have to re-add Lightproof Grammar AND change the default settings of it via Plug-in Managment.

Been using LO instead of MS Office, completely, since 2014 and finally completely switched to Linux in December 2016, though used it on servers and test systems and dual boot since 1999.

I do have a copy of MS Word 2003 (only) on WINE, which I've only run to check it's working, a full Office XP on a VM and also a copy of MS Word on a VM and an old XP box, none of which gets used.

Used Word since 2.0a and MS Office since 4.3. Used to sell MS products.

In 10 years of supporting and selling MS stuff, the only support I could get from them was TechNet and MSDN CDs. Expensive.

Currently online searches for Linux and LO Issues is better than that and better than MS's web site which now seems to mostly sell Office 365. Many articles seem gone or hidden.

The sooner AI stops trying to mimic human intelligence, the better – as there isn't any

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Learns?

That's marketing speak. No AI is capable of learning at all. It's pattern recognition aided by human curated data and human initial labelling.

But indeed, you don't really know if it's matching (data comparisons) for what you intended or some other feature in the images. We see patterns, familiar objects in clouds, toast, flames in the fire, scattered stones. Because once we understand chair, we can decide to use a crate as a chair. A child that has eaten bread and sausages will assume a sausage-in-a-bun or a hot dog is edible. A two year old can do things easily that are impossible for AI.

It's called the AI paradox and it was known nearly 60 years ago.

Expert systems were the big thing in AI in the 1980s because they used text. The problem was capturing the expert. Faster cpus, bigger databases and more RAM simply made actually simpler so called image recognition possible. There is no recognition. Just matching.

It's all marketing. None use "machine learning" or "neural networks" as those don't mean what they mean outside of AI marketing.

Even machine translation has gone backwards. It now uses a brute force approach like a giant Rosetta stone and matching phrases and words.

Text to speech isn't much better than nearly 40 years ago and so called smart agents are just voice to text front ends using pattern matching to search engines and chat bots hardly better than Eliza or ALICE. Speech recognition has moved from being a program on your car radio, phone or PC to something creepy running on a 3rd party system, the so called cloud. That's a backward step in privacy and needs the Internet.

Google says once third-party cookies are toast, Chrome won't help ad networks track individuals around the web

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: Targeting

And will Google stop tracking everyone via Chrome and all the Google services Web sites use?

Google doesn't need 3rd party cookies. Probably doesn't even need cookies, though logins use them for simplicity.

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

Mage Silver badge

Re: scotland then

They voted FOR the Union because UK in the EU.

Not having EU borders will compensate for having an English one. Spain will swallow worries about Barcelona and agree to Scottish Accession.

Maybe NI Unionists should revive the idea of the Kingdom of Dalriada rather than trusting Tories, who will be in Westminster forever if Scotland leaves.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Re: In hindsight

The only country in the world ever, to voluntarily decide to have worse trading terms.

And with the most successful bloc, for all it's very many faults.

Also by 2019 Sterling had dropped to 5th. It was 1st before the USA created a federal Dollar in the early 20th C. Then was soon 2nd.

Guess who is 2nd and catching up on the Dollar? The euro, that the UK media keeps calling a failure.

Certainly the EU needs reform, certainly it's flawed. But those are not reasons to leave. Also most of the immigration to UK was non-EU people and not covered by EU freedom of movement. Now there is a brain and skill drain of EU citizens.

It was always about the Offshore money laundering. The EU finalised new rules in 2016. These came in at Jan 2019 and Jan 2020. Even in Switzerland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland and Monaco. But not in the IoM, Channel Is or the Western Atlantic/Caribbean UK Overseas.

Even Singapore and Panama are going to reform. But not British Overseas Territories. The Leave campaign was a lie for the Elite, hedgefunds and more dubious City enterprises doing laundering, avoidance and offshoring.

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Price vs Value

Because of dishonst customs declarations, most countries customs have a right, by local law, to decide the value of a shipment.

"But it's secondhand baby clothes and a present."

"They look new. We'll catalogue them, decide the value and charge appropriately."

I remember equipment "passports", the Carnot, or otherwise you paid duty on your gear crossing the frontier, going and returning.

Companies need to document the part LEAVING and then there is no VAT or duty on it returning, perhaps repaired or "refurbished".

Claiming back VAT can be an option too. It's nothing to do with the EU or Seagate, but UK Customs rules for foreign countries. Previously applied to USA, Thailand, China etc.

Chill out, lockdown ain't over yet – perhaps FUZIX on the Pi Pico could feature in your weekend shed projects

Mage Silver badge

Re: Freedos might fit with a bit of twiddle.

There is DosBox for ARM. Even my old E65 Symbian phone could run some DOS x86 games. The user input was the limiting factor.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Young people these days...

No, only little Epson computers with possibly a Z80 or related and slim LCD panel in the case, circa 1979 or 1980 had only 32K RAM.

Even an Apple II had 48K.

No real laptop I remember had less than 2M RAM, real ones that ran on battery and had colour mostly 128M and upwards.

Maybe Minix could run on 640K, I forget.

Mage Silver badge

Re: Young people these days...

And the luggable laptop with a Plasma screen and real computer card slots only ran off mains. It did look like a clamshell laptop.

What's CNAME of your game? This DNS-based tracking defies your browser privacy defenses

Mage Silver badge

Re: 'accept or bugger off' versions

That is illegal on two levels.

1) Obtuse T&C

2) Blocking access if not logging in.

Really cookies are only absolutely needed if you are logging in. On all other sites I also block 1st person cookies. Only a year later I discovered some sites use a cookie to count site views.

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Grr!

’tis evil.

I'd be surprised if Facebook & friends aren't doing this. Google doesn't need to due to the stupidity of websites using a plethora of Google resources. Why do Theme designers and websites generally think it's cool to have similar fonts to standard ones, but Google Hosted, Google Analytics instead of their own, Google hosted javascript instead of their own. Google APIs when there are no Google services like Maps on the page. I can't see how the use of any of that is legal in the EU and the quite a few other countries with similar laws.

Parasites.

Doctor, I think I have an HDMI: Apple starts investigating M1 Mac Mini graphics issues

Mage Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Lead solder can still be used

Or the spacing is tiny. Some Swiss watch makers can use it.

Bring back lead solder and recycle. I'm convinced lead free solder increases stuff to landfill.

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: USB Keypad

How can you have decent tactile switches with a single panel display?

Why does a keyboard need USB-C?

It seems like a nice idea badly done.

Facebook bans sharing of news in Australia – starting now – rather than submit to pay-for-news-plan

Mage Silver badge
Alert

Re: "can't access state health departments on Facebook"

Yet they are incapable of blocking neo-nazis, paedophiles, scam adverts, bullies, racists, anti-vaxers and massive amounts of bot propaganda.

Australian government missing the point. It's not the news scraping is the issue, they are indeed doing more than links. It's the cesspit existing and exploiting the users.

Mage Silver badge
Mushroom

Meh

Just delete all Zukerberg apps and your account.

I told you it was bad. See last frame.

No-one needs that cesspit of bullies and misinformation where the users are the product.

Total shame on companies using it and twitter for customer support. Lazy and damaging customers.

Mobile World Congress to run this year's Barcelona event in June with 50,000 attendees. We're speechless

Mage Silver badge
Devil

Crazy

And was it even useful for most attendees even 10 years ago?

My boss – then – put his laptop between the chair back and his back and it was stolen.

It's greed and stupidly that this even still exists.

Wells Fargo patent troll case has finance world all aquiver so Barclays, TD Bank sign up to Open Invention Network

Mage Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Thank Halliburton

No, it started with how the USPTO works and Edison.

Patent Trolls started with Edison. He was one.

It's a direct consequence of the deliberate design of how the USPTO works. Rather than spending money on checking validity, prior art, obvious to someone versed in the Art, Novelty etc, they approve, because then they get paid. The theory is that invalid approvals should be challenged in Court. This is since the Victorian Era and favours big companies and most of all lawyers. Apple might spend more on Patent related costs than real R&D. In reality the actual iPhone Patents and Design Patents (UK= Registered Designs) are laughable and should have been cancelled. But Samsung is an Alien owned company in the USA.

IBM and Qualcomm are practically patent trolls.

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

Mage Silver badge
Coat

Re: Modernism

Though underused compared with Art Deco (just before 1928 Modernism) and now used to to describe anything older than about 1965. Art Nouveau is confusingly before Art Deco. Then before that you have the Pre-Raphaelites who are confusingly long after Raphael.

Modernism is sort of related to Bauhaus, 1919 to 1935, which was shuttered by the Nazis. Some of the Bauhaus furniture still looks pretty modern, nearly 100 years later. The architecture in a way was developed into brutalism. Falling Water looks pretty as do many 1930s industrial buildings, but is a maintenance nightmare. A survey a few years ago got the public to rate buildings and found that the longer the Architect has been in practice the less the public liked them. Ego takes over from practicality, beauty and function.

Really anything after 1939 is probably post-modernist.

Don't get me started on retro, especially as regards styles of appliances and radios. Gah!

'It's where the industry is heading': LibreOffice team working on WebAssembly port

Mage Silver badge
Devil

It's the way the industry is heading

A totally stupid reason.

The reason some companies are doing it is to stop selling SW and only rent it. Also so called Cloud based gives them more control.

Web based is fine for collaborative. It's a stupid bonkers model for local applications with data used by one person at a time.

Less secure, less private, lower availability, bigger resource and environmental footprint.

Any Web version has to be purely a complementary option, NEVER the default.

Huawei invokes 140-year-old law at England's High Court in latest bid to thwart CFO's US-Canada extradition

Mage Silver badge

Re: Lady driver

Same time as soldiers in USA bases on Okinawa get tried by the Japanese for crimes committed outside the base.

The USA solved the driving issue in Okinawa by making the whole island drive on the right. Japan drives on the left like Ireland and the UK. Which side of the road to people drive on in the US areas of bases in the UK?