Posts by 45RPM

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

It’s sad, but not surprising, that people can’t be trusted to act in a morally upstanding manner. I’m sure that, individually, these people are lovely - but when dealing with strangers, bits and bytes, they seem to forget that the bits and bytes that they are monetising are real life sentient being. The dream of the internet is turning into a bit of a nightmare. Turn it off. We’re done (well, except for El Reg. That can stay. And Stack Overflow. Er. I quite like Wikipedia too… And some others…)

Seriously though, this is an engineering problem. Do not track isn’t a flag - it’s a whole stack of defences in the war for privacy. It’s faked MAC addresses. It’s obfuscated font lists. It’s invented email. It’s denying websites the ability to query the computer. It’s regularly deleted cookies. Sometimes its user decisions too - lies about your birthday. We can’t stop tracking from happening - but we can make it difficult to do.

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

Vote with your wallets. If you want a Tesla then buy one (and book a page in the next Darwin awards). If you’d rather have a safer and less gimmicky car then you can buy one of those too - there are hundreds of other car manufacturers.

British boffins build diamond battery capable of working for a millennium or five

Re: Low power

Seems to be a deficiency in El Reg standards. I can’t find any units for power. So I don’t understand how much power this is - nothing to compare to, see?

Elementary OS 8 'Circe' conjures Wayland magic

Re: The easy life

Cut, Copy, Paste and Delete are always in the Edit menu. They feel like typical editing tasks. Similarly, Edit feels like a good place to put Undo (and by extension Redo). I suppose you could have an extra menu for Select tasks - but the menu bar might get a bit unwieldy. Looking through my Edit menus they do all seem to be the sort of tasks an Editor might use. But fine. Rename it. But be consistent about the name, its contents and its use.

A small point of correction though - it's not Microsoft's error. Once again, this seems to be an example of the industry slavishly following Apple's lead. Origin of the file edit view help menus

Re: The easy life

Up to a point, and only for people who really understand what they’re doing. Even for most Linux users this argument doesn’t hold much water (or we’d all be using Arch). And this is the main problem with Linux as a desktop OS - most people don’t know what they’re doing. Functionality wise, Linux scores 100%. Appearance wise (and, by extension, consistency wise) Linux still has a long was to go - even the best looking Linux is only consistent as far as the apps that it comes with are concerned (the instant you install a third party application the illusion of consistency gets thrown out of the window). And for day to day work, I think we’d all like a consistent OS - whether we admit to it or not.

Fingers on the downvote button. I’m about to be controversial. I love Linux. All of my servers run it. Hell, my games boxes run it as well (Steam and RetroPie). But for work? I need to be fast and efficient, and I still want Unixy underpinnings, so I use a Mac. It gets worse (or better, depending on your point of view). All of the members of my teams, barring two hold-outs who’re sticking with Windows (it takes all sorts), have switched too - even the hard core Linux hold-outs. Once you overcome any prejudices you might have, once you drop any geek machismo that you might be holding on to, you find that consistency can be a great accelerator in day to day tasks.

Yup, half of that thought-leader crap on LinkedIn is indeed AI scribbled

Just remember, the "Type-A" personality is named that way, because it's the first one they came up with, and as such, it's missing vital features, and doesn't work properly.

That's exactly what I think when I hear someone describe themselves as "an alpha male"

I’ve got way better things to do with my time than read the crap that gets posted on LinkedIn. Besides, the last thing I read there was some shite, purporting to be scientifically backed up (in which case, cite), claiming that global warming is nothing to worry about and renewable energy is pointless. It didn’t read as if it was AI generated - so either AI still has a way to go to be as stupid as humans or AI is now even stupider than I thought it was (which is oddly comforting - I’ll have a job a while longer!)

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

“Just” is your word, and implies that a shell is a minor thing. It isn’t - for the majority of users the shell is everything. When most people think of the Mac OS they think of the GUI, but that ain’t it. The OS is Darwin.

The Windows 95 shell was a huge thing. As you say, it provided 32 bit compatibility (so did DOS/4G by the way, but that wasn’t an OS either). It provided preemptive multi tasking and memory protection. And I don’t deny that, once started, it took over some of the functions of the operating system. But could it boot the computer? Nope. Did it sit on top of DOS? Yes. You could argue that that just makes DOS the Kernel - but DOS is more than just a Kernel.

<nerd mode>Actually, Windows 95 used one operating system. MS-DOS. Windows 3 and Windows 95 were just graphical shells on top of the DOS OS. Still, it seems a little daft to have remnants of the Windows 3 shell lurking in Windows 95 - but visual consistency has never been Microsoft’s strong suit</nerd mode>

The Register takes AMD's Ryzen 9800X3D for a spin

Okay. Time for the old nomex knickers - because I'm going to innocently throw some shade here, and ask what's wrong with these numbers? But first, the proviso…

The proviso is that I think these new CPUs are great for games (because the games are written for Windows, not for any other reason). I think that these CPUs might be great for some highly specific business use-cases (because the software is written for Windows, not for any other reason). But for general business and software development tasks? Even server tasks? No. The day of X86 and X64 is done. The future belongs to ARM and not only for its parsimonious power consumption.

Let's look at some numbers. Note that this comparison was done on the CPU Monkey site, which as far as I can tell has no particular bias for one manufacturer over another. Note also that I picked the very cheapest M4 chip that money can buy - and it still toasted the Ryzen in many benchmarks where a test has been run. Had I specced it up a wee bit to a Max or a Pro then it would have smoked the Ryzen across the board (but that would open me up to criticisms of cheating). Note also that I have a couple of Ryzen powered machines (and a Xeon, and an M2) and I like 'em all.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_7_9800x3d-vs-apple_m4_8_cpu

What have I missed? Because it looks to me as if the chip in a £599 Mac (which is actually a 10 core, not the 8 core that I used in the comparison on CPU monkey) is faster than a £400 CPU that just gets you the CPU. I mean yes, the PC is upgradable after purchase - which is certainly not nothing - but most users don't upgrade their computers from purchase to chuck time, so that's only a valuable function for people like you and me. Not for the general purchaser.

Scoring - down vote with a valid comment is a valid downvote, and counts me as wrong. Down vote without a comment or with a valueless comment counts for nothing. And I'd genuinely like to understand what's going on here.

Officials warn of Russia's tech-for-troops deal with North Korea amid Ukraine conflict

Re: Poor sods...

Operation get behind the Norky?

Apple quietly admits 8GB isn't enough in 2024, M4 iMac to ship with 16GB as standard

I have an 8GB MacBook Air supplied to me for work. I use it for Java development, the usual bureaucratic necessities of work and, just like everyone else, I’m not tidy about web browsing - and I keep tabs open for far longer than necessary. Usually in multiple windows. Oh, and to make matters worse, I often have two different browsers open - Edge and Safari.

8GB is not enough. But it’s not enough because of the price of memory vs the cost of an Apple computer. It appears cheapskate. Enough would be 24 or 32GB (taking into account the cost of memory and the impossibility of upgrading later).

But, practically speaking? Yes. I think 8GB is enough. Whether the Mac is particularly efficient about its memory use (it is) or whether its 8GB is more like a huge L2 cache (it kinda is) with the SSD stepping up more like a memory when required (glad I back up - I’m probably wearing out that SSD horribly), my MacBook Air never feels slow and is always ready to do whatever I ask of it.

So yes. 8GB is enough to work with. But they should be providing more. Ideally, I think they should provide DIMM slots so that memory can be added for the computer to page fault to. That way it wouldn’t risk damaging the SSD.

Perplexity AI decries News Corp's 'simply false' data scraping claims

In building an AI, one of the biggest concerns has to be the cleanliness of the initial dataset. I’d argue that this alone makes scraping the broader internet a very foolish thing to do if the object is to build a tool which is useful and expert in its field. That said, at least the internet as a whole has a broad range of views that one can draw on - so at least it will be equally awful on a wide range of views and opinions.

Training any dataset on a Murdoch organ like the New York Post though? I mean, fine if you want to build a uniquely fascist AI with objectionably racist views. Like building an AI out of the Daily Fail or the Maily Telegraph. I wouldn’t even want to build an AI out of the Guardian - although I suspect in that case the worst thing that could be said about it is that it had a perplexing predilection for home made muesli.

Musk's $1M election lottery raises serious legal concerns, says Pennsylvania governor

Judging by the downvotes, I’d say that the magatards and musktards are out in force today - but too busying shuffling about in the corner whilst listening to music to be able to reply verbally.

Come on! Use your words!

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

Oops! Firstly, that should have been 22.04 - and secondly, it seems that Canonical have fixed the problems that prevented me from updating seamlessly. So I posted (and, it must be admitted, somewhat drunkenly) in error. Tried again today - and it will come as no surprise to anyone - the upgrade completed easily and successfully (if not entirely quickly!)

So my apologies Canonical. And thank you.

So when can I update my 20.04 release to Numbat seamlessly? I prefer to stick to LTS releases. Equally, I prefer my upgrades to be smooth - and my experience with Linux is that they haven’t quite nailed this yet. Great OS - not yet ready “for the rest of us”

Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks

Okay. Genuinely. I don’t understand what the appeal of Windows is anymore. I started using it when Windows 3.0 came out, I grew out of it when I discovered A/UX. Windows seems to me to be an antipattern in computing. Now if it works for you then that’s great - keep using it - but that suggests to me that you probably aren’t a ‘real’ IT professional. It’s a toy. It might even be a useful toy. But it isn’t as useful as a real OS.

So what is a real OS? Quick test to see if your OS is real. The terminal shell is something like bash or zsh (take your pick - you have a choice) and it comes with tools like ls, vi, emacs, less and so forth.

Apple macOS 15 Sequoia is officially UNIX. If anyone cares...

Hands on the table, I’m pissed. I’ve been drinking since lunch time - so what I say next should be considered in the light of excessive alcohol intake. And not just beer either. Beer. Wine. More beer. Rum. Probably some other drinks I’ve forgotten. But it’s Friday - and what else is POETS day for?

But I digress. Apple (weird. I don’t think I drank any cider or brandy. Remiss? Or forgetful?) is being criticised here for complying with standards. Often it gets criticised for, apparently, not complying with some (often imaginary) standard. Can they get a break?

As a software developer it seems to me that both Apple OSes and Linux based OSes (including those from Google) are scrupulously standards compliant - and hence easy to switch to and from.

The lock in is with Windows. I’m not even saying that’s a bad thing either (pissed, remember? All is good with the world!) If windows works for you then more power to your elbow. Enjoy. Just don’t bitch about some imaginary Apple lock in. ‘Cos it’s just that - imaginary.

But, speaking of lock in, I think there might be some spirits that I haven’t drink yet. Chin chin!

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Yes! A marriage of computer science and Lego to make the ultimate Geek toy. Everyone should support this. Hell, I’d buy it - and I’m more a Meccano man myself.

Earth's new mini-moon swings by, then ghosts us by late November

I’m not saying that it’s aliens. But you know it is. It’s an alien battlecruiser in disguise. And Bruce Willis won’t be able to save us this time.

With Granite Rapids, Intel is back to trading blows with AMD

I know. Actually, I agree with you - I’d like that too. But the truth of the matter is that people who care about such things are increasingly in the minority - in much the same way that people who care about the repairability of their car or home appliances are in the minority. Nowadays the vast majority of people are content to get someone else to fix it for them - or dispose of it if that’s no longer possible.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but that’s the reality of the world today. Even in the data centre, we just use IAC to define an upgrade - we don’t think about, or care, about what’s actually happening with the underlying hardware.

Controversial perhaps - but who cares? Intel is yesterday’s news. On laptops, we’re moving to ARM and in the data centre we see better performance per dollar by using Graviton (also ARM). I guess Intel still has relevance for gaming -

but how much longer will that hold true.

I’ll stick my neck out and say that, despite the fact that I have a couple of very nice computers with Ryzen processors, the whole x86 / x64 architecture is going the way of the Itanic.

Look! About chest high! Is it a pallet? Is it a drone? No, it's a Palletrone

Or, to put it another way, enough for half a days worth of tea for the average builder.

Re: Whilst I enjoy the novelty...

With fierce loyalty to its owner and a homicidal attitude to everyone else? Sterling plan!

Torvalds weighs in on 'nasty' Rust vs C for Linux debate

Re: Hard truths

I mean yes. But I value the old kit for a different reason. Whilst I’m quite happy to write multithreaded C code, my old brain isn’t quite so capable at handling multiple concurrent threads. And these blasted new computers with their AIs and enough memory to handle a thousand simultaneous tabs and windows. How am I supposed to remember which one I was working in?

Better a nice simple computer with only a dozen windows at most, and an elegant architecture. 68K for the win!

/shoutingatclouds

vi or emacs?

The answer is nano

I don’t need to prove my chops by using the hardest tool possible. A good programmer is lazy - use the easiest tool available - and prove your skill by writing good C* code.

* or Rust. Or Basic. Or Java. Choose your poison. I don’t care.

Putin really wants Trump back in the White House

Re: "Of course dobbie wants the FOCF back in the 'House."

Fat Orange Cock Face?

Re: Stupid is as stupid writes

Have a thumbs up - if only for this line "Don't call me a "Dem" either just because I like to break down arguments. I am staunchly independent and moderate. I do this to both sides, and I usually try to balance my ballot."

Keep breaking it down! Keep being balanced!

Re: Stupid is as stupid writes

"This is vastly different to how the US works. The US does not care who gets crushed in the process of them winning. Just ask the CIA." - Sadly, I can't disagree with this statement. But that isn't how it should work if we want to advance as a society.

"The reality being it is making China rich. In the US as in Europe the green push is pushing up energy costs and hurting the economy." - Also, I can't disagree. However… If we do nothing then the damage to the ecosystem will be so catastrophic that it will cost trillions just to maintain the status quo, and that might not even be possible. Better, and cheaper, to repair the damage now (and also make some money from the repair work on the side!). Obviously, the oil companies will have to pivot or suffer - but that's a price worth paying for the sake of our children's futures.

"The 'border bill' was nothing of the such. It was more money to Ukraine, more to Israel, allowing thousands of illegals into the US and maybe a little bit for added security." - I think I read that there was a quid pro quo of money for Ukraine tacked on, but that seems like a worthwhile addition to take on an aggressor. Overall though, the border bill gave the GOP pretty much what it claimed it wanted.

Re: Stupid is as stupid writes

Splutter! Seriously? Are you taking the bloody piss?

Intelligent people like to see their enemies weak and not strong - Intelligent people know that the real art of the deal is for both parties to walk away from the negotiation feeling that they 'won' something. And that only by working together can human civilisation advance.

Dems support green policies, that is currently destroying Western economies - Intelligent people know that anthropogenic climate change is real and will foment war and destroy civilisations (not to mention entire ecosystems). Intelligent people also understand that, vested interests of big oil notwithstanding, there's gold in them thar hills - and green policies will leave us richer than ignoring the problem.

Dems support the war on conventional energy like oil and gas - see above.

Dems support societal changes that are unacceptable for most of the worlds population, like drag queens and men posing as women in sports events - f me gently with a chainsaw you have some offensive and prejudiced attitudes don't you?

Dems support uncontrolled immigration - no, and their immigration control policies were shot down by the Republicans so that Trump had a ticket to campaign on.

Dems support uncontrolled consumption of drugs in the USA - which explains perfectly why the addiction problem is dropping. AFAIK, only Cannabis is on the ticket for legalisation - but what's the alternative? Ever larger gaols?

Dems support the industrial military complex - words fail me. You have no evidence at all to support this claim, at least not to the extent that Democrats are any worse than Republicans

Putin officially made statements that he is supporting vice president Harris - yes, of course he makes such claims. He's stirring the pot and making claims that the terminally hard of thinking can pick up and use as talking points. Well done. You took the bait.

Being old doesn't confer legitimacy upon it. In a truly democratic system the person with the most votes should be the winner - whether or not we agree with them. To be clear, the system adopted in the UK, FPTP, is not truly democratic either - and is open to all kinds of shenanigans and corruption. So, yes, I know what the word 'corrupt' means and if we agree with the dictionary definition of Democracy (i.e. that democracy is a system where the power is vested with the people) then the Electoral College is a corruption of the democratic system.

I'll leave the last word to the US Embassy (https://uk.usembassy.gov/the-electoral-college)

"The winner of the Electoral College vote is usually the candidate who has won the popular vote. However, it is possible to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. There have been a total of five candidates who have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, with the most recent cases occurring in the 2016 and 2000 elections. Two other presidents—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888—became president without winning the popular vote. In the 1824 election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Jackson won the popular vote but neither won a majority of Electoral College votes."

Here’s the problem. Those of us who think critically have known for years that the orange man is bad news. He’s a cheating, lying, racist grifter whose few successes have been based on luck and on scamming others. His only talent is a certain shiny TV charm, which is appealing to people with a room temperature (C, not K) IQ.

The risk is that he doesn’t win the popular vote (which seems increasingly likely at the moment) but that he gets handed the presidency by a corrupt electoral college system and a stuffed Supreme Court. The irony being, of course, all the snowflake whining from the MAGA movement that this is what will be perpetrated against them.

Whether we agree with them or not on policy, we have to hope that the Dems win in November AND are able to take the Presidency, House and Senate - because, right now, they really are the only party which is standing up for democracy.

That having been said, I truly hope that the Republican Party can sort itself out - a single party state, even one where the single party has the best interests of its people at heart, is not a healthy state of affairs. Further more, those parties need to be able to work together on bipartisan policies - rather than just stamping on each others toes.

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

Re: Stunning engineering....

My Dualit toaster and kettle perhaps. But not a lot else.

Apple debuts iPhone 16, Watch Series 10, assorted AirPods

Exactly this. It’s exciting to you because it solves your problem. But in terms of the actual tech, impressive though it undoubtedly is? Meh! Same with Apple’s announcement yesterday. Meh!

Given the number of people who need hearing aids I’d be surprised if the volumes they’re manufactured in is that low - I think the issue is more that they need to be tuned for the user, and (as far as I can tell) Apple is the only company to have fully automated that process.

As for being invisible, given the number of white wireless headphones from a multitude of manufacturers that I see when I’m out and about, I’d say that looking like AirPods is about as unobtrusive as you can get.

As the first commentard said, these technology announcements have stopped feeling magical. It’s all meh, meh, meh and oh! Wait a moment… now that is interesting.

It’s all just technology for technology’s sake. The exception is if the technology being announced has particular value to you as an individual. And Apple hit that moment for me last night.

Have you seen the cost of hearing aids? One thousand, two thousand, three thousand pounds and more. And here (hear!?) comes Apple at less than £250 with an FDA certified hearing aid. I’m not interested in them as headphones - but as a hearing aid they have my attention and my wallet is open.

My wife often tells me that my opinions and views are somewhat esoteric and probably not representative of the wider population (apparently not everyone prefers to compute on an escapee from the 1980s, and not everyone’s fantasy garage contains a Pinarello Dogma F), but on this I’m going to stick my neck out and say that the new magical technology growth space that will excite people is health. I think that Apple is onto a winner here.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Absolutely I understood. And if Commodore and Atari hadn’t mucked up then they’d still be with us. If Apple hadn’t mucked up then perhaps it wouldn’t be with us in its current form, or perhaps at all, today (if the original update plan for macOS, Copland, had been followed rather than a move to NextStep would macOS today be Unix based? Would the iPhone exist? Maybe not). So perhaps Apple’s mess in the 90s was fortuitous. And System 7.5.x was a truly woeful OS - and most people haven’t heard of its rather lovely sibling, A/UX.

So many errors. None discussed here.

Wow! What happened with this article? Did you get bored and submit it incomplete? No mention of the ARM and RISCOS (arguably the most important 32bit since it leads to the world of today, with its phones and tablets and power efficient servers, laptops and desktops), no mention of the 68020 and its offspring, powering high end Amiga, high end ST (well as high end as the ST ever got </flame off>) and macOS (the offspring of which are still with us today).

But still you squeezed in the Hobbit, interesting but about the most irrelevant CPU ever made, barely even a footnote in history, and ignore SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS and other evolutionary dead ends which, although dead (or dying) are all still more relevant than the hobbit.

C- See me after class.

Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die

No one has tried (as far as I can tell) to add too many new functions to a hammer. But, even so, I’d argue that a lump hammer (symmetrical head) is easier to use* than a ball peen or a claw hammer.

Now imagine a hammer which has been overloaded with twenty different functions. Does that sound like a good idea?

Really?

*easier to use, not necessarily the right tool for the job!

No longer fit for purpose might be putting it too strongly - but certainly no longer intuitive. The more controls there are, the more things there are to control, the less user friendly the whatever-it-is is going to be.

Years ago I had a 1968 Beetle. There weren’t very many switches, knobs or dials - how it worked was pretty obvious. With my current car, all gizmos and level whatever autonomous driving, I’ll be buggered if I can work out all the functions. I’ve given up to be honest. It’s not intuitive anymore. I’m certainly not going to attempt to repair it myself.

Similarly, buying shampoo (or anything) at the supermarket. Too much damn choice.

Can anyone else hear the sound of an old man shouting at clouds?

I think part of the problem is that the desktop UI paradigm is still stuck in the early 1980s. Yes, the graphics are flashier, and yes there are new apps that weren’t around back then - but, ultimately, everything either works the same way or is forced to fit that old way of working.

It seems to me that there’s something of a usability bell curve. V1 is rubbish, V2 is less rubbish and V3 is pretty good. From a Mac perspective, the pinnacle of control usability was in System (MacOS) 6.0.8. After reaching that peak (for whatever OS) either the functionality gets overloaded and increasingly unusable - or the paradigm needs to be changed entirely.

Windows and MacOS have both been completely rewritten under the hood (DOS to NT, Classic to Unix) - but the fundamental paradigm hasn’t significantly changed. iOS was a paradigm shift - but that too has now been overloaded past its breaking point (when was the last time anyone found it truly intuitive?), ditto Android, tvOS and… I suspect that Vision is still on the upswing - but I wouldn’t know ‘cos I’ve never used it. But even if it does end up reaching perfection, we all know that the next update will begin to break it.

The problem with a paradigm shift though is that it alienates the established users. They don’t like change. Well, perhaps some do - but I don’t know many. I certainly don’t (I still think of C++ as being something of an upstart, so don’t get me started on Rust!) - but that’s a me problem, and I know I’m being silly.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

The 80s were a glorious rainbow of computers and operating systems. By the late nineties it was practically a monoculture, with MacOS the only holdout - and that was hanging on by its fingertips. Nowadays I think that we're in the healthiest situation since the 80s. We have Windows (and a plethora of PCs ranging from cheap and crap through to expensive and interesting), we have Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, we have Raspberry Pi, we have Haiku, we have Chrome - and that's before we consider all the really niche machines that are also available these days like the Spectrum Next or The C64 Maxi.

Re: Sinclair QL wasn't 16 bit

It leapt from 8bit to 8bit - hence the name Quantum Leap (reflecting that it was the smallest possible change - from quantum, the minimum amount of any physical property involved in an interaction). There are advantages to the 32bit nature of some of (not all of) the 68008's internal components, but speed isn't significant amongst them - and most (if not all) can be replicated through clever programming and paging on a 'true' 8 bitter.

Still, no doubt Linus Torvalds learned a lot from his ownership of one, perhaps we can indirectly thank the QL for Linux - which was a hell of a leap, and nothing quantum about it.

Elon Musk reins in Grok AI bot to stop election misinformation

Re: What is misinformation ..

Slippery and salty antics, smelling of fish, that are banned worldwide - and (apparently) common in some sea-life zoos?

Re: What is misinformation ..

If you think about it, the answer to your question should be obvious. But, if you find it all a bit too confusing, there are these things called truths and things called lies. Lies are things with didn’t happen or aren’t going to happen. Truths are things which did happen or are going to happen (in the case of future events then this is to the best available knowledge, and might include published schedules from a creditable source (i.e a source which publishes future events correctly far more often than not))

Trying to pass off a lie as a truth is what’s called misinformation. Famous sources of misinformation include Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump - and anyone who claims that there are such things as ‘alternative facts’

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

<Spod mode>

Graphics and colour could be achieved on 8bit CP/M - but not many manufacturers implemented it. It required Digital Research (the developer of CP/M) GSX drivers (available in 8 and 16bit versions, and which evolved into the graphics system used by GEM, an early competitor to Windows)

Off the top of my head, Sony, Epson, Panasonic and NEC provided GSX - and Sony and NEC were the only ones to do it in colour. That said, Amstrads PCW was also able to run graphical programs - so perhaps that had GSX too?

</spod mode>

Under-fire Elon Musk urged to get a grip on X and reality – or resign

Get a grip on Twitter!? He can’t even get a grip on himself. He really does behave like the worst kind of spoiled toddler.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

The biggest ballache

I had a CP/M machine back in the dim and distant past. The first was a Newbrain and the second an Apple IIe with a Microsoft Softcard. And CP/M made them compatible - but only sort of. Yes, they could run the same software (although sometimes, as with Wordstar, it was necessary to run a configuration program to set up the screen correctly first) - but, astonishingly, they couldn’t actually use the same disk format. So to copy files and programs from my old Newbrain to my newer Apple I needed to squirt everything over serial. Despite both having 5.25” disk drives.

I was incredibly envious of those lucky so and sos who had an Amstrad PCW. Yes, Amstrad, purveyor of all kinds of tosh and nonsense also made the best CP/M machine of them all - and given that the disk formats weren’t compatible anyway it didn’t matter that it had an odd 3” disk drive.

How did a CrowdStrike file crash millions of Windows computers? We take a closer look at the code

Ssh! Don’t mention the Mac word. It doesn’t count until Microsoft rips the technology off - and then the argument will be made that Apple also ripped the technology off because… something.