Posts by 45RPM 1480 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010
1Meg? I used to run Wordstar in 32K. Supercalc needed no more either, nor DBase II if it comes to that. 1Meg is bloat!
And MacWrite used to run, with a GUI recognisable and usable by da yoof ov tooday, in 128k. I mean, it was rubbish, but it ran.
I don’t need everything to run in the web. In fact, where possible, I’d rather that it didn’t. I like being able to work offline. What I would like to see is seriously lightweight software. Seriously, who needs Excel most of the time? Or Word? And no one needs to be subjected to PowerPoint or Access! I’d like something else, please.
Instead of frigging around with Office Clones, on the web of all places, can we have some lightweight integrated packages again? Microsoft Works, for example, or Claris Works - I loved them, and I’d choose them again in a heartbeat (Claris in particular, which let you draw any of its supported document types into any document).
Perhaps less sensibly, and proving that I might be a smidge old-fashioned, I’d also like to see some big-hitter choice again. I’d like to see the return of WordPerfect as a cross platform leviathan and alternative to Word. I’d like to see Resolve and Lotus 123 again. Okay, perhaps I am just being silly and unnecessarily nostalgic.
It's a pity that they can't show sanity in public - but your statement that "they agree on a lot more than you might think" and are prepared to work in a bipartisan manner for the common good does give me hope. So thank you.
I guess, from the evidence, that this happens more on the 'small' things (i.e. the here and now things that affect people today or tomorrow - like RomneyCare (or, as it was rebranded, ObamaCare)) rather than on the big things - like climate change or impeachments, where there's too much at stake reputationally, and it's too much in the public eye. But then there's a wildcard like Trump, who goes nuts - and rips up treaties and legislation from both sides of the house, just because it didn't have his name on it.
I wonder if sealed ballots would help in the house - at the moment, I imagine that many politicians are scared of voting as their conscience dictates because their voting record can be examined. But perhaps it would just make matters worse.
What a mess.
I don’t know what the truth of this story is but Bloomberg isn’t exactly the most reliable news agency out there. It’s slightly above The Sunday Sport - but it’s marginal.
Wake me up when a reliable agency covers this story - The FT, Reuters, The Guardian, BBC - or even ElReg covering the story directly rather than the story about the story.
Yes. This.
Take the price of computers, for example. Adjusted for inflation, a humble Speccy cost £800. No screen, no mass storage included. And yet people (most, perhaps) baulk at paying this much for a laptop nowadays. But, if we’re going to pay a fair price and not exploit others, this is probably what it costs - and then we have to accept that a yearly renewal of our tech is not sustainable - we need to look after it and make it last longer.
All round, paying more would be better for the planet and better for the workers. But it’ll never happen. It won’t happen because of my greed, your greed (apologies - I’m assuming you enjoy cheap tech as much as I do!) and the greed of people like Bezos. Nearly all of us are culpable to one degree or another.
In a spectacular display of what, I’m sure, has to count for hyperbole and bad parenting, I’m afraid to say that I raised the spectre of Amazon as a whip to encourage m’boy to do his bloody homeschooling.
One boy needs no encouragement. He works his socks off. The other however, would rather idle his life away looking for ways around our network security to enjoy the internet’s copious supply of … well, never mind what. The point is that he isn’t doing what he should be doing - his homework.
So I’ve pointed out that Amazon is a strange, double headed, beast. If he works hard at school, gets a good degree, and proves himself then, if he wants a job at Amazon, they’ll coddle him and pay him well and use his mighty intellect to build a clever online system to put someone else out of business. On the other hand, if he idles his life away, Amazon will offer him 50 years of slavery, where even a loo break is frowned upon, with a pitiful pittance of a pension at the end of it - if he’s lucky.
Sadly, it’s not an argument that seems to convince him. It seems that Amazon’s behaviour is too unbelievable to be convincing.
So why do I still use them? Because they’re convenient, dammit. And I’m a massive hypocrite. But I do try to find alternatives.
Surely your first course of action would be to run like hell? The possession of a weapon causes an aggressive action, possibly lethal, to become the easier option (than running) and therefore increase the likelihood of serious injury or death. If the only recourse is to self defence then yes, do what you need to.
There is no doubt that the primary culprit is the idiot with the knife (and what a stupid idea for a Youtube video - I only hope that it would have been taken down). I’d say that threatening someone at all, whether with a real weapon or even with a toy, is a stupid thing to do. But shooting someone? Nope. Two wrongs don’t make a right - and both of them were armed in a public space.
Even if you accept that it is reasonable for someone to be able to walk around, armed, in a civilised society (and I don’t), it isn’t reasonable that you shoot to kill. Shoot to warn. Shoot to injure - or, better yet, get the hell out of the area in which you are endangered (run like hell).
It’s worth noting that in countries where firearms are strictly controlled, there are fewer violent deaths and injuries (whether in the course of committing another crime or not). The argument that a gun can provide personal safety just doesn’t hold water for society as a whole.
I didn’t mean to imply that the car gets you from A to B autonomously. I meant it as an analogy. A Ford Model T has no electronic tech at all but gets you from A to B more simply than the alternative - a horse. It’s not very luxurious, but it’ll do the job.
I love the theory of Chromebook - but I find the implementation, in that one has to give so much data to Google and your privacy is as good as non-existent, problematic. Not, it must be said, that I blame Google for this - sure, it doesn’t fit my use-case, but it isn’t evil to want to be paid. We all have to eat.
I blame the users in many ways. The real cancer at the heart of computing is the idea that software should be free, that only tangible hardware should be paid for. This isn’t a dig at open-source either - I love the stuff. But software, even open-source, does need to be paid for somehow, whether by perpetual license (how old-fashioned), by rental (like Office 365), in a support contract (very Enterprise) - or by significant investment from the people selling the hardware (like Apple) or licensing the software (like Google). So how does Google invest, permitting Chromebooks and Android Phones to be such good value? Well, as we all know, they do it by scrobbling all the data about their users that they legally can and then selling it. Which is fair enough - but it doesn’t work for me.
I’d love it if users realised that the value of their computer isn’t in the hardware particularly - it’s in the software. What do you want your car to do? Be prestigious and luxurious (the hardware)? Or get you from A to B with minimum fuss (the software)? If people could be persuaded to pay fairly for the software that they use then we might see a world with Chromebooks (albeit more expensive Chromebooks to cover the software development costs) which protect their users privacy, whilst still doing all the wonderful, convenient, things that Chromebooks do.
Until then, my Chromebook will just be a repurposed old Thinkpad, kept because I’m a software nerd and I love playing with OSes. But it won’t be my daily driver.
you’ve got to appreciate Lenovo’s ability to craft a computer, which remains unparalleled
I’ve got a Lenovo, and I’ve had a few others in the past. They’re very good, no-doubt. But unparalleled? No. They are far from unparalleled. They’re very good - but, in my view, they aren’t the best you can get.
That said, I haven’t yet had a rubbish Lenovo - so they’re right up there in terms of consistency. They’re consistently very good.
I don’t understand the partisanship here. It’s like when I was young, the tribal wars between C64 owners and Speccy owners. Or, later, the wars between Amiga vs. ST. If it works for your use-case then you bought the right thing. You aren’t a mug. You’d be a mug if you listened to someone else calling you a mug and then bought a device (phone, car, computer, kettle, whatever) which suited their use-case rather than yours.
It’s not a case that Apple or Microsoft or Google or Canonical or Facebook* or whoever are bad and whichever your favourite company is is good. It’s a case that all are different, all have their merits, and we should think critically before deciding and then buy the device(s) that work for us.
Sorry. This partisanship really gets on my tits. It’s the same with politics. It’s so playground. It’s so childish. And, since we are supposedly adults, and we work in IT (therefore, I assume, we’re all qualified and intelligent), we should be better than this.
* Okay. So I think Facebook is bad. So perhaps not all are good. I also have an objection to Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Arms dealers etc. But generally speaking in the field of IT providers, I think that my point is valid.
No doubt. I’d like to pay less than 30%. But the fact remains that Apple has paid significantly more into my account that Google or Microsoft. Google tax me on my privacy (and also charge me for my developer account). Microsoft charge me for the OS and tool chain. Apple take 15% to 30% depending on your revenue. Everyone pays a tax - it’s just a question of where you prefer to be charged.
You missed the ‘some’ - and that critically changes the meaning of the sentence. I’ll bet that the majority buy for a fatuous reason like Fashion. Enough buy for reasons of privacy to make it a worthwhile business model.
Now you might cynically doubt that Apple is really really private. You might think that Apple is merrily slurping data with the best of them. It’s been said before. But before you make such claims think - can I cite credible evidence or is this just gut feeling? If the latter, don’t say it. If the former then where’s your evidence?
Here the issue is Apple doesn't like anybody profits from its platform without paying the Apple tax.
This is unduly cynical. Where Apple benefits is that it’s realised that there’s gold in them thar hills of privacy, because some people really care about not leaking their data willy-nilly, and the majority of those people aren’t savvy enough to roll their own Linux or get a custom Android build device. People will pay for that - and that’s where Apple benefits.
If someone profits from the device in a way that doesn’t impact privacy, for example in non-tracking adverts, then Apple won’t stop them and it won’t require them to pay the imaginary Apple Tax.
It’s worth noting, by the way, that my business has received more money from Apple sales than it has from Android, Linux or Windows sales - and it’s also worth noting that I’ve paid out more to Microsoft in OS updates and IDEs than I have to Apple in developer fees (note that the Apple toolchain of OS and IDE is free) - so the Apple Tax is, at least from my perspective, a myth.
There are a few devices that I’ve bought that left me feeling ‘Wow - that was money well spent. Why didn’t I buy that sooner’. My Synology was one. That was more than ten years ago - so I hardly think that they’re newcomers to the business.
That said, it does seem somewhat foolhardy to restrict your users in this manner, particularly in the enterprise space. Sure, say these are the certified spinners - but you can use others if you really want to. I worry about the longevity of the device if they enforce this certification rule.
Thumb up because I like your analogy. The thing is that sometimes the only alternative to C is Assembly language. Use C when speed is of prime importance, or when you are resource constrained - otherwise there may be better alternatives. Use the right tool for the job. Not every problem needs a hammer or a screwdriver.
The problem isn’t C - the problem is developers misusing it. Would you ban formula 1 because the average motorist can’t handle a racing car? No. You have to use the tool appropriately, and make sure that the programmer has the skills to use it.
I’d argue that that struct should contain the buffer size as well and only access for read or write via a function which checks the size before accessing the buffer. When calloc’ing (or malloc’ing) or freeing the buffer size gets updated by the function making the updates.
No disagreement here. Paper books, and proper programming languages (I'll allow Python, but not Scratch) are what's required! But take that with the (large) pinch of salt that comes with the admission that I'm not a teacher, although I have enough experience to know that I'd be a very bad one, and therefore I may be talking out of my hat since I don't appreciate the problems that they experience.
Just because I was taught how to use a slide rule doesn't mean that the kids of today should be forced to learn how to use one too.
Again, I'd argue that it depends on the use-case. Even with the keyboard, it's lighter than my MacBook - and the battery lasts considerably longer. As a cyclist, the least weight that I can stuff in my panniers the better. So it has largely supplanted the laptop for me. I have several IDEs on it, video editing, photo editing, word processing, spreadsheets - for me, that about covers the mobile use case. And when I get to my desk, the 'real' computer can take the load.
's 'orses fer courses, innit?
I have a desktop computer. I can't be bothered with these fiddling laptop things, no matter how powerful. The desktop gets used for development work and admin and the like. I regard it as essential, and one day I'll buy another.
I have a fiddling laptop thing. I take it on holiday with me, and I use it on the train, where it gets pressed into service as an ersatz desktop. My heart sinks at the thought that one day I might have to buy another - I can think of things that I'd rather spend money on.
I have an iPad Pro. As a means of vegging out and consuming - video, and in particular newspapers, magazines and comics, it is peerless. But when I add a keyboard (Brydge in my case) and mouse (Logitech) it's very nearly the equal of my laptop - but it's lighter and easier on the battery. I use it for all kinds of work then. And I may not need to buy another laptop - I'll just get another iPad - and I have no objection to doing that.
I have a Kindle. As a means of reading pulp fiction it's great. You know the thing - thrillers, adventures, crap prose but an exciting story. For the books I want to savour and enjoy again and again, works of art, I'm an avid supporter of tree murder.
For my use case, I don't need iPadOS and macOS to be any more integrated than they are already. For that matter, with iCloud installed on my PC, I don't need Windows and iPadOS to be any more integrated than they are already. I like my iPad a lot. The laptop I'm meh about.
Your use-case is probably different to mine - so isn't it great that we have a choice?
I remember having to maintain an entire application written in Perl. It wasn't pretty. The developer who wrote it was a bad developer - and not just for their poor choice of programming language. There was an admonishment in the comments at the top of each source file warning against the use of use strict because it would break the code. As far as my simple C coder soul was concerned, if you have to ignore errors then your code is broken.
It took me ages to fix it so that use strict could be used - but, once I made those changes, the application was a lot more reliable. They never did let me port it to C though.
Recent governments, and the Tory party in particular, seem to have a real problem with ‘experts’ - whether those experts are scientist, engineers, whatever. What they seem to like are populists and their blandishments, regardless of how based in reality those blandishments might be. We’ve seen it with the covid response (which has lead to the highest death rate per capita in the world), with Brexit (which is only mildly inconvenient and expensive at the moment, at least compared with the raging storm of financial loss and disaster that it will become over the next few years), with the NHS (which absolutely won’t be sold off - oops).
Populism be damned. Let’s now listen to the science, pay attention to the evidence - and put any exceptionalist and jingoistic ‘feelings’ on the back burner for a while. Someone needs to hold our Government’s feet to the fire - and if it’s the LibDems then so be it (but, ultimately, this is a bigger issue than any one party).
You’re quite right. Thumbs up. Very toxic. My tongue was (inappropriately) in my cheek - but nevertheless, I wish that I had gone for a drink with her. Not for anything other than to talk to another human being and find out what makes them tick. I’m a gregarious fellow, and I’m always interested in other people - and I missed an opportunity there. Although not for hanky-panky because, as you correctly point out, I was off-the-market. That said…
…I do have friends who swing, equally split male and female. So, whilst it’s not unreasonable to call me out for toxic masculinity, it’s not 100% sure to be the case…
At risk of giving away where I worked, I was on the company stand at IPEX in 1998 (I think) and a large print supplies company had the spectacular idea of having a free bar staffed with glamour models for the use of bona fide visitors (use of the bar, that is, not the models) to their stand. Not something that you could get away with now. No one wanted to visit our stand at all, which meant that I was very lonely doing demos of a high end scanner and printer (I can’t remember whose, except that my then girlfriend worked for the scanner company and the printer company was Israeli). No one wanted to see my boring demo.
In a break, I got chatting to one of the girls, who’d been watching my demo. She asked if I had to use the scanner, or whether I could just import pictures by other means and print them out - thereby only using the printer - because she wanted a high quality hard copy of her portfolio. I cleared it with my boss, and imported the images from a CD that she gave me - where she was wearing a damn sight less than she was on the stand with the bar. Suddenly my demos were a lot more popular! There was plenty of variety to the content as well - her friends wanted their portfolios printed too. I don’t know why the print supplies company didn’t object - but they didn’t seem to. They certainly didn’t cease and desist us.
One of the girls gave me her business card, with her hotel room number on it. I didn’t take her up on the hint - and now, more than twenty years later, I can’t for the life of me work out why not. Regrets? I’ve had a few…
Years ago, I went to investigate a problem at a printing press which had been running successfully and, apparently, continuously for four years. Then, suddenly, and without warning, it stopped. The press seemed to be on - but nothing was being printed, and it didn’t appear on the network.
The problem wasn’t too hard to diagnose. The RIP was running on a PowerMac 8100 - and when I say running, I mean ‘not running’ and when I say PowerMac 8100, I mean ex-PowerMac 8100. Such apparent reliability is astonishing for a computer running MacOS 7.1 (IIRC), but I suppose that if it’s only running one application, and no ones fiddling with it then that helps. It’s even more astonishing when you consider all the paper dust flying around - and which did for the Mac. Not only was the PSU clogged (I’m amazed that there wasn’t a fire), but the system unit was stuffed with the biggest papery dust-bunnies you’ve ever seen. Result? Overheating and a dead Mac. I replaced the Mac, and everything was well again - although I’m sure that it probably ended up meeting the same grisly end.
My problem with the mouse, back in the eighties when I first saw such a beast (dangling out of my new-fangled Amstrad PC-1512, as it happens), was a) orientation (all these years later, I can’t for the life of me work out why I found it so hard to point the mouse with its tail away from me) and b) understanding that I could pick the mouse up without moving the pointer if I needed it to scoot a little further than the desk permitted.
Not, it must be said, that the mouse often troubled me. The GUI bundled with it, GEM, was a pile of old pants - and, for years, I stuck with what I knew from my previous computer. Wordstar. Which didn’t need a mouse. To the extent that, when I carelessly bundled the computer into the boot of my car to come home for the summer vac (I was at Uni), I slammed the boot on the rodent and drove home with shattered rodent bouncing on the motorway. It’s death bothered me not one jot - and I didn’t touch a mouse again until I bought a Mac* to learn 68000 assembly language on.
* I wanted a computer with an internal hard drive, which is why I didn’t go for Amiga or ST, and I wanted a small footprint (big box Amiga or ST could have given me the hard disk that I wanted, but they’d have competed for desk-space with the Amstrad’s replacement - a mammoth Opus PCV386) - so I got an SE/30 second hand. Which I still have.
As a user of both, I’d dispute that. My Z800 is comparable in cost and purpose to my Mac Pro, and is by far the worse machine. Sure, it has its uses - but it’s the old Mac Pro that I use every day.
And yes, I missed the part about ‘build yourself’. In my experience, build it yourself is great for personal satisfaction and knowing that you’ve got one of a kind. It’s also great if you have a particular use case that none of the usual suspects caters for. Providing the best bang for your buck though? Nope. Not in my experience.
Ultimately though, there’s a place for both. And some of the kit that Apple builds is stupidly overpriced. Other kit is astonishingly good value - although that’s caveated in that Apple doesn’t make low end kit. If you think that all Apple products are bad value, well, then you’re just being silly.
Thumbs up to you, thumbs down to me. Thank you for the proof read! This is what’s called a failure to attend to the detail - I misread it as iMac Pro. I was too busy lining up a snide comment on Apple’s headphones.
If there was an option for me to downvote my own comment then I’d use it. I could delete it, I suppose, but it feels a little Trumpian to try to hide my sins from the world and deny that I’ve been a doofus.
That wins an award for the most pointless comparison of the day! I have a Raspberry Pi which cost less than a tenner - it’s a computer too, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a valid comparison.
Did you one kilopound machine have comparable CPU performance - single threaded, multithreaded? A comparable monitor - resolution, response, colour accuracy? Comparable memory? Comparable storage? Etc., Etc. And whether it’s industrial grade or not is moot - what does that even mean? Is my Z800 Industrial Grade (it was built for business, after all)? And if it is, then is my old Mac Pro (which is, objectively, the better built machine)?
Still, if you’re happy with your computer then that’s really all that matters. And the $4800 that you saved can buy an awful lot of good stuff. A nice second hand car. A holiday. A pair of Apple Airpod Max Pro (coming soon, with optional extra cost, wheeled bra to transport the heavy ass things around)!
For TVs, Computers, Consoles and so forth I can't see any downside to this. But what about home hubs for home automation tasks? What about PVRs - you can't turn them off or the flippin' things won't record your TV programmes.
Similarly, what about appliances like ovens or the hob? I'm not sure that I want to sure them off at the wall each time I've finished using them - equally, I don't want them to be guzzling power just to dimly show a clock.
The more you look, the more you find devices which don't have a true off, only a standby. In some cases I've put them on a little ring of their own with a switch that I turn off at night (because I got a bit obsessive when the house was being rewired a few years back) - but that doesn't work for all use-cases.
One tech law that he could pass would be to prohibit devices (TVs, PVRs, computers, consoles etc) whose standby mode uses more than, say, 0.5w power. I don’t know how feasible that is right now - but I’m fairly sure it could be done given the willpower to do it. And the amount of power (and hence greenhouse gas emissions) that that would save would be astonishing.
Sennheiser FTW! I dropped a few hundred quid on really nice Sennheiser cans and they do sound brilliant. Better than AirPod Max? Well, having read the reviews I’m not certain that I’d go that far - AirPod Max sound, apparently, really really good. That said, I’m not sure that they sound twice as good as my Sennheisers - and that’s the point, isn’t it? Bang per buck. And my cheaper (but still costly) Sennheisers have the following points in their favour…
* They’re cheaper
* They’re lighter
* They look nicer (to my eyes, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder)
* They connect easily and automatically to my iPhone, and I can connect using a good old fashioned cable too - for devices that support it (which is a massive advantage in my view).
* The noise cancellation works well - although, again, perhaps not quite as well as AirPods Max from what I’ve read.
Overall, I think that the AirPods Max do look impressive. Would I want a pair? No - I’d rather have my Sennheisers, and pocket the change. Would I dismiss them out of hand? No - I wouldn’t do that either.
I don’t have a problem with the Touch Bar - and all of my software supports it. It’s not as if adding support for it was difficult. That said, ahem, none of my Macs have a Touch Bar - so that might go some way towards explaining why I don’t have a problem with it.
I’ve never had a problem with MacSafe either, nor with genuine Apple chargers falling apart or overheating. I still have the charger for my old black MacBook (which I no longer have), and I use it with my 2010 Air. It still works perfectly.
I was thinking of buying a new MacBook - but if MagSafe is making a return I’ll definitely wait for that.
A program feels substantial. Worth paying for. It might come in a box - but it’s definitely supported.
An app is fluff. Not really worth paying for - it’s like those wee covered peanuts in a bowl on the bar.
This appification of software development is my bete noir as a software developer. Is what what we do not worth paying a fair price for because you can’t physically grasp it in your hands?
And yes, I’m another crossover user. Or rather, I’ve paid for it because I think that they do excellent work, I’ve played with it - but I don’t actually need to use it on a daily basis (mainly, I suppose, because I don’t play games that often)
I wonder if you’re quite right about the more modern cars presenting a particular problem. As I understand it (and I don’t work in the motor business, so I could be totally wrong), most modern cars (built in the last 30 years (!) ) use CANBus, which is a robust and well understood standard. Presumably, when it gets to the stage of preserving these old japolys, manufacturers of replacement components (electric drive trains and so forth, as you suggest) will create Open ECUs (Linux based?) with open drivers and support for this known and widely used standard.
Astonishing. I have devices with flash memory which are far older than these Teslas and all of which still work perfectly (although I do wonder if there's a way of profiling the SSDs to find out how much life they have left in them). So what's the deal? Have I just been lucky, or has Tesla cheaped out on the components in its cars?
In any event, the electric-ness of its cars aside (which I think we can all agree is great, and Tesla did much to remove the milk-float image of EVs, but other manufacturers are now doing this well as well), Teslas do seem to be a bit. Ahem. Well. Crappy. All the focus nowadays seems to be on toys - games console in the car, whoopee cushions for the seats, Autopilot which is arse about face and which seems to be the cause of many accidents*. The build quality isn't there. How old is Elon anyway? 8?
It's not a fair comparison, but I would note that my 300,000 mile V70 still works perfectly in every respect, and it's just as quick as it needs to be - the old car manufacturers still have an ace up their sleeve that Tesla doesn't.
* actually, I'm going to ask for a slight retraction of that comment. The cause of the accidents are drivers dim enough to believe the hype.
Ahh, happy days. Mr Doggy does a Poo sounds a bit like a modern day update of a Speccy classic that I wrote soon after the launch of the rubber-keyed powerhouse. Tophat man takes a Dump. Astonishingly, I found a C12 Cassette the other day with this early masterpiece of mine on it, which depicts the heartwarming story of a man in a top hat who goes for a walk across the screen, occasionally depositing turds behind him.
I told my kids about its genesis on graph paper, working out how tophat man should look (not entirely unlike a skinny, armless, crap version of Jet Set Willy, as it happens) and how how the large dumps should look. I don’t think they cared - but they did show mild interest in the crap that he deposited.
Perhaps I should post it to the internet?
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