* Posts by Liam Proven

2304 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jan 2008

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Linux/ia64 is maintained out-of-tree since November 2023

> I consider that a productive outcome for everybody involved.

Well, good.

As far as I can see, though, you still haven't emailed me. I suggest you do that and we can talk about the effort and then, given some more info, I could write about it.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "...everyone who's still onboard the Itanic..."

> It's an older joke sir, but it checks out.

It's an older writer. :-P

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Linux/ia64 is maintained out-of-tree since November 2023

[Author here]

This is absolutely fascinating.

From this, I have also found http://epic-linux.org/

(HTTP in 2024? No wonder it's not widely discussed!)

That contains personal attacks against me by name. I am not happy about that. It says a correction was sent. I checked; it means you left a comment.

Firstly, you should know, most Reg authors follow the simple rule of "never read the comments." I'm one of the only ones who does, and I only check for a day or two if that as a rule.

So: for future reference, leaving a comment *isn't sending a correction.*

Secondly, we have a corrections address, as described here:

https://www.theregister.com/Profile/contact/

Thirdly, to contact any Reg author, there's a comment form right at the top of every Reg article. As far as I can see you have not used that.

As a counter-example: Tomáš Glozar of Red Hat Brno _did_ contact the editor about the GCC 14 article and we changed it.

Now I know about this, I will go look for more info.

But emailing us is the way to tell us about errors, or to let us know about new projects, continuations, etc. Leaving a comment is *NOT* how to do it. Our hero moderators do their best, but it's a low-priority task, which is why you got duplicated comments here.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Isn't emulation largely pointless?

> I'd rather see someone properly emulate IBM PReP systems

1. QEMU does cover PReP.

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/ppc/prep.html

2. I'd argue it's only partly IBM, but hey.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Very Long Indeterminate Wait

FWIW, the last time I wrote about Itanium, there were lots of people in the comments telling me about VLIW DSP and other specialised processors.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2023/11/21/saving_linux_on_itanium/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> Aren't they dead easy to find for free lying behind most skips?

No. They're close to as scarce as hen's teeth.

Sales were just barely in the tens of thousands of units in their best years.

https://www.theregister.com/2005/02/28/itanium_04_sales/

The improved but incompatible American model of the ZX Spectrum, the Timex Sinclair 2068, sold 80K units.

https://www.retrothing.com/2009/05/timex-sinclair-2068-computer.html

There are probably more TS2068s out there than Itanic boxes.

An awful lot of FOSS should thank the Academy

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Thank you Liam

> There were twists, there were sidequests, there was bonus value.

> Top article.

Oh, excellent -- that is great to hear. Thank you!

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: bit hypocritical?

> This is a super informative article, btw.

Oh, good! Thanks!

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: bit hypocritical?

> it seems strange than FOSS organisations should actually choose to get into bed with it

A good point, well made.

SuperHTML is here to rescue you from syntax errors, and it's FOSS

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Optional application of the fonts you chose in Frontpage.

> Microsoft Frontpage some 35 years ago

So, 2 years before timbl released HTML 1.0 and a year before Windows 3.0 was released?

My my, you _were_ an early adopter.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

> Have you seen Hugo?

TBH, no, I haven't, and it sounds quite interesting. Thanks for the link!

I will have to see if the deeply new-thing-sceptical friend who hosts what I laughingly call my website would be willing to install it. He won't allow anything written in any form of PHP on any server he runs, is very suspicious of Ruby, and dismisses containers and most 21st century tech.

(Said website is really just a rescued mirror of my nearly-3-decade-old home page, and apart from changing a few dates, I've not touched it this century.)

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I dunno. . .

> But my eyes, and fingers, are from the 1950s. Were fully mature in the 1970s.

Mine were a decade later.

The thing is, keyboard design wasn't mature until the mid-1980s, and software end of the 1980s.

Which is what I covered here:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I dunno. . .

> Mr Proven would be so kind to amplify his criticism of emacs

Sure. Did that in 2021.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/17/tilde_text_editor/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I dunno. . .

> an IDE that will allow me to split a window vertically or horizontally so that I can look at two (or more) parts of the code at once

MS-DOS 5's EDIT.EXE, released 1991?

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: I dunno. . .

> If I have emacs, what more could I possibly need?

A usable, ergonomic user-interface that looks like it's at least from the 1990s?

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML

> they just want to supply the text of that content

I saw a blog post on the Orange Site a couple of years ago that was called "the language of the Web is HTML" or words to that effect.

In essence it said all you needed was HTML, CSS and images.

The Javascript weenies were _up in arms_, aided and abetted by the PHP folks and their acolytes. Livid they were. :-D

Me, I want to dump some Markdown in a folder and have it magically appear on the web, without anything interpreted in anything involved in between. No JS, no PHP, nothing that isn't type- and bounds-checked native code, thankyouverymuch.

I think I also saw sites where someone found a way to directly serve .TXT files over HTTP. Links were the hard bit. I saw a web page constructed without even HTML, and I kinda liked it.

Can't find either again now, sadly.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> m4

M4, as in what used to make sendmail.cf _slightly_ less brutal?

Is this some sort of BDSM thing? Mortification of the flesh, for dabbling in the sins of the Web kind of thing?

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

[Author here]

> But has this really never been done before?

This isn't really my area -- I did without it and checked a preview pane -- but as I understand it, yes, it's been done before, but only in proprietary ways in proprietary tools. This is FOSS and works with any editor that speaks LSP, which includes dozens of them, old as well as new.

El Reg's editors were quite excited when they read my piece when I filed it. :-)

Bitwarden's FOSS halo slips as new SDK requirement locks down freedoms

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: The balance tipped.

[Author here]

> VSCode.

Hang on hang on hang on a cotton-pickin' minute there.

You mean you *ever* trusted Microsoft?

...

Want to buy a bridge? It's very historic. Pretty too.

HMD delivers Android Digital Detox feature to stop you scrolling your life away

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Digital Detox ?

> How about disabling all smartphone functionality except for the ability to make and recieve phone calls ?

No thanks. I almost never ever call anyone, or receive calls. It's the least useful function of the device to the extent that I had a rooted-and-reflashed Chinese smartphone (a PPTV King 7) on which the microphone didn't work, and it barely impacted my use of the device. I just carried headphones in my pocket.

I would like a phone that can do calls, texts, messages across all my protocols and services, emails, and nothing much else. Play music would be good. Maybe open links I was sent, but not let me go to new URLs.

This feature is a step in the right direction, but only a small step.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> HMD also makes very cheap 4G Dumb Phones

I said right there in the article:

«

HMD is the company that makes modern Nokia-branded handsets, and it markets some of them – essentially its 21st century feature devices – as "detox phones."

»

With a link. What more can I do?

Want to feel old? Excel just entered its 40th year

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: slash file retrieve

Wotcher Ali!

> thrown itself into the Windows dev programme much earlier.

The thing is, Lotus trusted MS and wasted its time building an OS/2 version...

https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-1-2-3/1x-os-2

It was called 1-2-3/G and for its time it was sophisticated. Lotus was long on top of GUI programming and on classic MacOS it had Jazz, a spreadsheet-cum-presentation program.

https://winworldpc.com/product/lotus-jazz/1x

It also had Symphony on DOS, an early integrated suite. Bit weird but it worked.

There was also Agenda, an early PIM organiser so of thing, Magellan a global search tool, and Grandview, a pretty good outliner which is now DOS freeware.

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/grandview/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Also does anyone remember

> a mockup of the 1-2-3 screen?

There was a PC DOS game in the late 1980s called **Locust 123** which _looked_ like 1-2-3 r2 but in fact was a game where you had to do simple arithmetic on numbers to progress. So you could sit there and play an educational game, I guess exercising and improving your mental arithmetic, while it looked like you were crunching numbers. :-)

Seems forgotten now; can't find a hint of it on Google.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: SuperCalc?

> Also a spreadsheet that ran on DEC RT-11 (or possibly TSX).

I am somehow very pleased that a version of Dibol still exists.

It's long gone now but there was a PC version of TSX, called TSX-32. One of the earlier 32-bit 80386 OSes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170730034612/http://www.sandh.com/tsxdist.htm

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Improv clones survive!

> Notably Quantrix, but there are/were others:

Fascinating. Thanks for that -- I had no idea.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: What, no love for Multiplan?

> What, no love for Multiplan?

No, none at all.

I considered some footnotes on Multiplan and indeed Quattro Pro.

Maybe for next year's Spreadsheet Day?

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Want to feel old?

Yeah, me neither. But...

Big browsers are about to throw a wrench in your ad-free paradise

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

[Author here]

> There are other browsers out there, of course.

Not really. Realistically, there are currently two.

1. Firefox

2. Chrome

3. That's it.

The end.

Apple users have a third option, Safari, which originated as an offshoot of what became Chrome. But if you run anything else, it's mostly not an option, although Midori gets an honourary mention.

Anything else is basically one of them, possibly with a mask over its head waiting for Fred Jones to rip it off, or it's a really old version of Firefox,... or is hopelessly crippled.

This, in my not remotely humble opinion, is a big problem.

There are possible upcoming alternatives, such as Servo:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/27/servo_returns/

And Ladybird:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/17/serenity_os_turns_five/

There are others which might be contenders one day -- e.g. https://gosub.io/ or https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ -- but not yet.

For something so important, I don't think two is enough.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Very funny

> So Mozilla flagged the crippled for Google version as being too insecure?

Well, not exactly, but kinda.

> That... makes sense to me. Just use the full non-crippled version.

Well yes.

> Yes I know your premise was 'wanting to run the exact same thing on both browsers'

It is one more thing for over-hassled users (and sysadmins) to keep track of. I think quite a lot of Chome-engined browser users don't _know_ they are using the Chrome engine.

> but that's a bad premise that gives Google exactly what it wanted with this particular bit of Be Evil.

Well yes.

There are other reasons, though. uBOL does not need an additional browser process; uBO does, which I suppose might be an issue for somebody somewhere. Maybe for super-restrictive permissions? Maybe in headless use? Someone somewhere probably has issues with it.

Perhaps there are innocuous sites that work with uBOL but not with uBO? I don't know of any but there may be.

The wide internet-using world has a remarkable ability to find extraordinarily convoluted ways to break things.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> Turns out it isn't a fear of Presbyterians.

«

… When it comes to my health, I think of my body as a temple, or at least as a relatively well managed Presbyterian youth center

»

-- Emo Philips

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

A former staff member at the Llama Group has commented over at Hackaday. It was, they claim, their idea, but the company has laid off almost all the original staff including the remaining WinAmp developers.

https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: CVS?

> The BuildTools directory has a copy of the tortoiseSVN msi and git (for windows) in it

Oh really? Good find!

What's better than using a version control system? TWO version control systems! :-D

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> I think it is a very bad idea to give the Winamp folk a hard time for releasing their source-code in any kind of context.

A fair point.

I did not mean to give them a hard time as such, merely to point out that they fairly heroically fluffed up the job.

But you are not wrong.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Damn Shame

> I wish there was a rough modern equivalent player that didn't suck.

Foobar2000 is my audio player of choice on Windows, macOS and Android these days.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

By one of the co-authors of WinAmp, I believe.

Sadly, there is no Linux version and it's not FOSS.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: It might even be a useful application for LLM bot-based "AI" tools.

> I can foresee absolutely no problem with feeding someone else's proprietary and copyrighted code into an "AI" LLM, trusting that it will remove anything problematic, and not use any of the copyrighted material for its own training model.

Excellent plan. I endorse this.

Let's do it with Windows 95 and see what comes out the end.

Unless of course the answer to that is "Windows ME".

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: This is what we come here for

> This is what we come here for

:-) Thank you very much. Now grinning widely here.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions

> They showed that they included GPL2 code

Er, no.

They included GPL2 code in the stuff they uploaded; that does NOT prove that WinAmp contained GPL2 code.

They accidentally included the source code of their proprietary audio streaming server as well. It is I think reasonably safe to conclude that did not form part of WinAmp.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: CVS?

> CVS?

I doubt it.

Look, TBH, if they were that clueful in the first place, then this wouldn't have happened.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> Otherwise why would the code have been in the zip file or whatever?

Um. Look, I try to avoid saying "have you read the article?" -- but: have you?

Do you think every copy of WinAmp included the Shoutcast _server_ in it? Hint: no, it didn't.

The whole point of the article is that what they shared _was not just the source of WinAmp_. That is what the article is about: that they mistakenly shared lots of other stuff that wasn't in fact part of the source code they were in fact _trying_ to share.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions

> So, then, what's the point?

The point is you don't get taken down or banned from GitHub.

A bit academic in hindsight, but there you go.

When I wrote this, the repo and the code was still there, making it easy to find the (literally) thousands of forks.

> Are they afraid somebody might take their baby and make a better version than they ever did?

Yes, I think exactly that.

Now, of course, legions of copies of the code are out there and perhaps new versions and ports will appear after all. With the names and serial numbers filed off.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

[Author here]

> If so much 3rd party code was in the repository

Hang on. I think you're making a big assumption here which for me ruins the joke. (It was a joke, right?)

"In the repository" -- *what* repository? What makes you think that they had a repository? Source repos are an element of a version control system. What makes you think they had one of those?

I think they probably had a big ol' Zip file, or a backup disk, or tape, or something like that, and some rookie staff member who doesn't know how Git works was told "put the source code on Github" and they tried.

Look, Microsoft *owns* GitHub, and when some staffer uploaded the rediscovered MS-DOS 4 source code:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/ms_dos_4_open_source/

... they screwed it up and did rookie mistakes like mixing up CR/LF versus LF line endings.

Git is horribly complicated, more than it needs to be for 99% of its users. Github adds an extra layer. It doesn't just need training: it needs deep knowledge and understanding. Most people using it do not have that.

Me included, and I did daily for over 4 years.

I strongly suspect a 20th century freeware proprietary Windows app had nothing like that. Maybe a shared network drive on an in-house server.

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

> chuckle when i see POS and Windows in the same sentence.

I can't lie, it was hard not to work a joke about this in there somehow.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Still in use

> do I need to restart CP/M to have a operating system that works 100% every day?

Idea: we crowdsource the dosh to buy Multiuser DOS from Integrated Systems Ltd in Thatcham, and we make it FOSS.

We have a 32-bit DOS-compatible multitasking OS. With networking.

Maybe we can get the FreeDOS folks on board and call it FreeDOS 2.

We throw out all the Windows bollocks and we go back to "as many apps as you want, but each one must be under 640kB".

:-D

Ubuntu turns 20: 'Oracular Oriole' shows this old bird's still got plenty of flight

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Bar/Panel on the left?

> it seems more natural to have my xfce4 panel on the right edge.

The trouble is that's where most GUIs place scrollbars.

(However unfashionable scrollbars are now.)

NeXTstep put scrollbars on the left. So did some other tools in the xterm era, I think.

Functional separation is good. Having a mouse movement in one direction for one function, and a different one for another unrelated one, works for me. YMMV.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

> Perhaps it is time to move on from the rpm vs apt wars?

I think you are not considering the context here. I was trying to explain why Ubuntu did so well, and what the key weak point of its biggest commercial rivals (the 2 big players in the RPM camp: Red Hat and SUSE) _at the time_ -- that being 20Y ago.

Bare `dpkg` wasn't much better.

But the point here is that when SUSE and Red Hat Linux (_not_ RHEL or Fedora, their forerunner) were pre-eminent, the companies didn't offer any wrappers or higher-level tools. RPM was all you got.

It was a disaster, but it was the norm and they and their corporate sponsors did not consider it a problem.

Today, tools like Btrfs and Flatpak and GNOME and Wayland, and arguably systemd, have comparably severe issues, but again, the companies still retain the same attitude: flat, adamant denial.

When someone reminds the world of how bad it was before, look: "isn't it time to let that lie? Why dig up the past?"

Because the companies refused to admit there were problems then, and their fans supported them.

Then something better came along and showed it wasn't an inherent problem.

They _had_ to catch up, and they did.

Now, they are pushing new flawed tools and the fans still angrily defend them.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: ISOs

> the CD would not have all the live session stuff.

Yup. Text only boot, text only installer.

Then, a version or two later, came a separate live CD.

IIRC, then came a graphical installer, and finally that moved onto the Live CD and the text installer went away.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

> Ubuntu: Swahili for "I failed to install Debian"

Excu-hu-se me.

The word "ùbúntù" is from isiXhosa and isiZulu, many thousands of kilometres away from East Africa where kiSwahili hails from. *Way* more different than English and Czech, say.

I take pride in my ability to pronounce the word "isiXhosa". :-P

And I quoted that gag over 2 years ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/31/the_cynics_guide_to_linux/

«

2. Ubuntu

"Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means *I can't configure Debian.*"

Ubuntu started out as an effort to displace Windows from the number one consumer OS spot by making a Linux that was easier to install and run. It worked. So Microsoft threatened to sue because it looked a bit like Windows if you squinted, and the whole thing fell apart. Ubuntu decided that if it was dodgy to look Windows-like, it would look like Mac OS X instead. Then it went back to GNOME again.

»

And I discussed the real meaning in a bootnote, because respect is due.

So there. :-P

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: "the formidably hard-to-install Debian"

> ... oh, oh, I expect Debian lovers to comment!

Oh, I so hope so. :-D

There was a wonderful editorial in one of the early UK Linux mags about the giant-brained Debianisti who were so horribly patronising because they'd been through the baptism of fire of getting the damned thing working.

They're not that much better now, mind you.

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

> (Brazilian distro which was eventually bought by Red Hat and became their Brazilian offices).

Nope. Conectiva was bought by Mandrake and is why the combined company was renamed Mandriva.

El Reg covered it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2005/02/24/mandrakesoft_connectiva/

I linked to it when I tried the modern descendants a couple of years ago:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/15/comparing_the_descendants_of_mandrake/

Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

Re: Apt good, rpm so-so

[Author here]

> True but you missed out Mandrake.

I did, you're right.

It was _much_ easier, to the extent that circa 2003, my lodger borrowed what she thought was a blank CD from the spindle in my office while I was at work and _accidentally_ installed Mandrake on her PC.

But I was never a big fan.

The early versions were just Red Hat Linux with KDE, with all the nastiness of original RPM.

The GUI tools weren't all that. The first time I tried a full install on a testbed PC, DiskDrake nuked 9 partitions and erased about half a dozen other OSes on my PC. (I think it was for a group test of Linux distros I wrote for PCW in about 2000.) I was _livid._

APT-RPM was promising but the trouble is that on distros not designed with it in mind, while it made _installing a new package_ easier, it became unreliable _upgrading_ existing packages.

If you tried to upgrade something present on your computer that APT-RPM did not install itself, the chances were high you'd nuke your PC. There were 3 likely outcomes:

* At best, that app stopped working and you had an even more painful session of dependency-chasing.

* More often, multiple other apps stopped working because their dependencies suddenly didn't match. (No overall dependency tree, no testing for overlaps etc.) Not only that but there was a fair chance your desired app _also_ stopped working.

* Worst case: your PC no longer boots, or it does but there's no desktop or something.

Ask me how I know. Go on.

I was experimenting with APT-RPM on SUSE Pro when Ubuntu arrived, and that is one reason I switched so fast. I'd had to reinstall SUSE multiple times because of APT-RPM-inflicted damage already.

So, yes, true, not all end-user-targeting distros were paid-for, but the free options, while better than, say, Debian or Slackware, were -- shall I be diplomatic and say "flawed"?