* Posts by Ian 55

1078 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2010

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How to get free software from yesteryear's IT crowd – trick code into thinking it's running on a rival PC

Ian 55

At the start of the PC clone era, plenty of BIOSes contained "NOT IBM" for basically this reason.

Someone (Digital Research?) was hoping to licence some bit of software (GEM??) on a manufacturer by manufacturer basis. As the point of a clone is that it'd run software written for the IBM PC, the various BIOS authors weren't about to let them succeed....

Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

Ian 55

Usage figures

And what's the proportion after all the bots pretending to be Chrome are stripped out?

Ian 55

Re: Do they have the means to survive?

(Looks at how much time is spent in FF)

I would pay - say $20 a year - but only if I knew the money wasn't going on crap like a LLM AI.

Apple-Intel divorce to be final next year

Ian 55

Re: I bought a MacMini 6 cores in late 2018

It'd help if Apple were forced to release the full specs of the T 'security + lots of other things' used on the Intel Mac* rather than forcing people to reverse engineer them.

LastOS slaps neon paint on Linux Mint and dares you to run Photoshop

Ian 55

It also looks like it's free for seven days, ie the standard Adobe trial period.

Ian 55

Re: Magazines

Or the lollipop on the cover of... was it an Atari ST magazine that decided cover 3.5" disks were getting a bit expensive?

Ian 55

Re: Bloatware Linux

sudo apt-get purge opera-stable

?

Ian 55

Re: Magazines

Mmm, the business of the large majority of magazines is to have just enough content to get enough users to pay for / pick up each issue so they can sell advertising space in it.

It's not to provide the content - that's not where the money is.

VPN Secure parent company CEO explains why he had to axe thousands of 'lifetime' deals

Ian 55

Benefits of being old

Some of us are old enough to remember board wargaming company SPI - dominant in its field for over a decade - having a cashflow issue* in the 1980s.

They got a loan from TSR, original publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, secured on SPI's assets. Some months later, TSR called in the loan, and SPI couldn't pay. TSR ended up with the physical assets and brands but lost huge amounts of goodwill when they refused to honour the lifetime subscriptions to SPI magazines like Strategy & Tactics.

That those subscribers also bought a large number of other SPI games escaped them, and the sector has never really recovered.

* Just how they managed that was fascinating. Thanks to a feedback system, they knew just how well games would sell to their existing customers *before* starting to design them. But they decided on their own that, amongst other things, that the US public wanted a role-playing game on the Dallas TV show. No, they didn't.

Ian 55

Re: This is the second time I've heard of something like this happening.

StackSocial has form for being used for clearly unsustainable offerings. The classic example - which I think I have been emailed about by them in the past month - is "lifetime" online backup for not many $s.

I can't remember the company concerned, but a look at the online reviews for the backup company when I first had the offer should have put them off having anything to do with them.

But a percentage of a terrible deal is still money...

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Ian 55

Re: It looked stupid when it was first announced

Plus Tesla refuse to give the required data.

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

Ian 55

Re: "just freewheeling with an LLM bot"

This is why I starred it - to remind me to look at it every so often for the entertainment value.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

Ian 55

Re: so many ads

Yes. There aren't may payment sites that need to be allowed in NoScript, but until you do so, you will have trouble buying stuff.

WordPress drama latest: Leader Matt Mullenweg exiles five contributors

Ian 55

Re: the only time to use wordpress...

The problem with auto updates is that you end up having garbage like Gutenberg installed - in core WP, not as an optional plugin - on your WP site, because MM is worried about Wix getting too much market share.

The ultimate Pi 5 arrives carrying 16GB ... and a price to match

Ian 55

Apple are clearly the "other" company he didn't want to name.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Ian 55

I could

At one point, I could happily beat a DOS system into submission, complete with sniffing that the automatic tools with QEMM386 wouldn't get as good results.

I still have much from the DOS days on a directory, thanks to how little space it takes up and a long habit of putting the data from an old drive onto the newer larger one, including the floppy images I did c2000.

But I also remember how much of a pain much of it used to be, and think that running a handful of games in DOSBOX-X is enough.

Are you better value for money than AI?

Ian 55

Gee, which would I rather have?

A human paralegal who understands both WTF I ask them to do and knows that they will be fired if they fuck up, or a LLM that has no idea that it's hallucinating caselaw?

Hmm.

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

Ian 55

Re: A quote

Pity about his sexual assaults though.

WordPress's Automattic openly tracks websites bailing from rival WP Engine

Ian 55

Re: WTF?

Hmm, why might someone called Matt spell 'automatic' with two Ts?

Proof he once had a sense of humour.

Oracle urged again to give up JavaScript trademark

Ian 55

The best bit of the article

The guy saying that it'll be around for five years and only maybe longer.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

Ian 55

Still pissed off at what O2 did to the Joggler

Something like three and a half of the five big reasons for buying one they had used in their ads disappeared in a compulsory over-the-air update.

Ian 55

Re: Reminds me of TV sets

.. up until a manufacturer is caught using GPL'd code in their driver's anyway.

It's how the big third-party router suites happened, wasn't it? Cisco was caught out and had to publish for others to adapt.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Ian 55

Re: Thanks Gary

In practice, you didn't bother with different 'user numbers' to separate things out - you just used a different floppy.

Ian 55

Re: Microsoft “licensed” QDOS from SCP

My memory is telling me that Microsoft started by licensing it and then, once they realised the legal implications might stop them making a shit load of money, bought it outright.

They ended up paying more later, didn't they? Something around not bothering to mention things like "we're gonna resell it to IBM"?

Ian 55

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

Can we have NewWord instead?

A better WS than WS 3 to the point that they bought it and rebranded it as a later WS version from memory.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Ian 55

Re: Bitcoin Inventors

I don't know what prompt is getting some LLM to come up with this, but it's textbook hallucination...

Ian 55

On cix back in the 90s, there was someone who was convinced their IMMENSE SKILLS would enable their program to successfully predict the lottery numbers. (It wasn't just their programming skills that were superhuman - they told the rest of us they had got an ex to give them a certificate saying they were great in bed: we were suitably impressed...)

I can't remember what their username was - nanos?

It wasn't you, was it?

In any case, there isn't the real money in the market to buy the Satoshi stash at anything like the alleged value.

Police allege 'evil twin' of in-flight Wi-Fi used to steal passenger's credentials

Ian 55

Re: Eh?

This is a reason one of my Gmail accounts gets the spam/misdirected email it does - plenty of people use the address.

Nasty regreSSHion bug in OpenSSH puts roughly 700K Linux boxes at risk

Ian 55

Re: Mitigation

Looking at the Ubuntu servers and local boxes, it could be that Canonical actively pushed this update - on several, it happened without me doing anything.

According to dpkg.log, it happened at the same time as updates I did agree to or initiate.

British Library's candid ransomware comms driven by 'emotional intelligence'

Ian 55

Re: Impressive

It wasn't me, but I'd bet they are a BL user.

Yes, the BL has done well in not paying and the status updates have improved and I'm sure it's been horrible for them too..

.. BUT..

.. it's now over six months since this, and unless something's changed in the past few days, you still can't order material to be ready for when you go to a reading room online or by email or by any other way than going to where the material isn't and asking for it to be there in several days time.

A day trip to London costs me about forty quid. That made sense if I knew the stuff I need would be ready in the reading room of my choice when I turned up. It doesn't if I have to go there just to ask for it to be there the next time I visit.

Ian 55

"What was affected was the quality of service we could give"

Otherwise known as 'if what you needed wasn't on a shelf in the reading room you were actually in, you very probably couldn't get it".

That moved to "if it wasn't somewhere in the building, you very probably couldn't get it".

I think we're still at the stage where you can now actually ask for offsite material - and an awful lot of the BL's holdings are kept offsite - but only if you schlep over to where you will want it in several days' time, because you can't request materials any other way.

That's fine if you live in London (or indeed Boston Spa) less fine if you live outside.

With Asmi 24.04, Ubuntu's never looked so snappy (without the Snaps)

Ian 55

Having tried it

There are things to like - the easy way to kill off snaps and flatpaks, for example - but it turns out that I just don't like XFCE.

Why is it that other desktops simply do not do windows as well as MATE does?

Ian 55

Re: It looks great, but is this a one person distro?

It's losing the upgrades over the standard xbuntu that I would be worried about.

I'm trying it now - is there a way to install the chromium browser without enabling snaps?

Ian 55

It looks great, but is this a one person distro?

Upstream, Ubuntu has a bunch of paid staff, but what happens if Tony George falls over?

Ian 55

The last straw for me was when Canonical withheld - "throttled" - security updates for Firefox to many users for at least two days because their snap store server was (is still?) not sufficiently resourced to cope with all users getting them ASAP.

That would have been bad enough by itself but one of the big reasons Canonical imposed snaps on Ubuntu was that users don't upgrade DEBs ASAP.

The issues with the almost complete lack of curation of what's allowed on the snap store is another issue. Far, far too many abandoned (and worse) packages.

Microsoft Publisher books its retirement party for 2026

Ian 55

Re: Serif PagePlus...

On Windows, I think it was six years from the paid for release of 1.x to the paid for update of 2.x, but quite!

That was much better than the gap between paid for updates of the PagePlus line.

Code archaeologist digs up oldest known ancestor of MS-DOS

Ian 55

Re: “Byte”

I have a memory of being told in the early 80s that IBM had used the size of a 'byte' to buy time at some point when minicomputers were biting into its market share: by announcing they were considering having a nine bit byte (can't remember if it would be eight data bits plus a parity bit or 'will support character sets with 512 characters') they ensured that enough customers would hold off buying someone else's eight bit byte kit and waste other companies' time redesigning for nine bit bytes.

When they had their new kit ready (the 360 range??) they went 'Oh, we've decided an eight bit byte is perfectly OK'.

Ian 55

Re: CP/M was (still is) Great

I did have an S100 CP/M system - given to me for free (or very very little) from someone who worked at the Fleet Street paper that used them for something or other. The BIOS was for hard sectored drives, but it could read soft sectored ones if you let it spend a few minutes working out the timings on any particular 8" floppy disk.

Alas, it was far too big to keep during a move a few years later.

I can see why they're rare: almost anything will emulate them better than they ever were.

Ian 55

Re: Seattle Computer Services and CP/M

Did we ever know the answer as to why the BDOS call to print a string used '$' as the string's terminator?

It was one of Gary Kildall's questions when they were denying just copying the API.

Ian 55

Re: Shift left, people.

FAT was fine until you swapped a floppy disk without ensuring everything necessary had been written to it.

CP/M's file system would at least detect that - the infamous 'BDOS ERROR ON B' - whereas QDOS/86-DOS and early PC-DOS/MS-DOS would happily write the info for the old disk onto the new one.

Result: two corrupted floppy disks instead of one.

Still, it would be worth it for the Unix-like pipes and multitasking we were promised for MS-DOS 2.0 ...

Infosec experts divided over 23andMe's 'victim-blaming' stance on data breach

Ian 55

Re: I just never understand

See the behaviour of various members of the UK's leading 'only important because of who they claim their ancestors were' family.

I am told that more than one senior royal declines to wear hats in food factories etc to stop anyone getting a hair sample off them.

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Ian 55

Re: Going to be awkward

Have I misunderstood that the higher frequencies used mean that you need more 5G masts than 4G ones and more 4G than 3G etc?

Similarly, they'll be an 'off' period while the actual kit is swapped, won't there?

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Ian 55

Re: Monopolistic stagnation

You did see that OpenAI, a company that Microsoft has given billions and billions and billions to, won't us MS Teams, didn't you?

Linux Mint 21.3 and Zorin 17 are beta buddies

Ian 55

For someone on MATE, how much change would they notice moving to Cinnamon?

Asking for some kids...

Ian 55

Re: Zorin

"FOSS programmers gladly fork existing projects to do things their own way and so need no encouragement."

It'd be funny if it weren't so painfully true.

Microsoft's bug bounty turns 10. Are these kinds of rewards making code more secure?

Ian 55

"We've paid $63m over 10 years, $60m in the past 5"

That says you were seriously underpaying in the first five or your products have become a lot worse or, most probably, both.

UK's cookie crumble: Data watchdog serves up tougher recipe for consent banners

Ian 55

Re: TANSTAAFL

The problem is that the stats are usually completely wrong because of things like click fraud.

When I used to buy advertising, I could call the print publications I wanted to advertise in, negotiate a good price and be sure that they shifted so many print copies of something I knew my targets would read and the ad would appear in just the pages they would look at.

If I bought advertising online now, I'd doubtless..

.. end up next to something praising Hitler on Twitter

.. pay for something 'seen' by the webspider bots of a Chinese search engine company

.. encourage a site whose owner doesn't have 'enabling genocide' as one of his biggest regrets, despite having done just that

.. be blocked by anyone with a clue.

Ian 55

Re: 30 days to get compliant with tracking rules or face enforcement action

In the 19th C, Punch suggested that a rash of insurance companies failing could be stopped by announcing that all the directors of the next one to fail would be hanged.

Worth trying, once updated a bit.

Ian 55

Re: Next should be non consentual email

I left NatWest after their IT failed around 2012 and customers' payments were missing for a couple of days. I was glad I had when they had similar problems again and again.

I recently took the £200 bribe to try them again, and it quickly became clear that £200 wasn't enough in exchange for the pain. The NatWest experience was bad and it's now *terrible*.

Ditch them.

First Direct's phone service is great and they'll bribe you to switch. Starling's app is great and they do not need to bribe people to switch. Other banks exist.

Revamped Raspberry Pi OS boasts Wayland desktop and improved imager tool

Ian 55

It worked for Apple...

Still does.

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