Posts by Ian 55 1078 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Feb 2010
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....
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.
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...
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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