Posts by jake

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: Beware sub par efforts

"this unit as sold will not make your grandparents Abba records sound worth listening to."

That doesn't mean much ... NOTHING can make abba worth listening to.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

Re: stupid is as stupid does

"What was she pouring over the pages - syrup, cream?"

It's almost always coffee in my experience. Occasionally cola of one varietal or another. Sometimes some other soft drink or tea. All of the above with far, far too much sugar in them, of course. Rarely water.

Re: Can you offer up a reference?

Ta. Yet another book to find a copy of ... The wife will be thrilled. Not. :-)

My lizard hind-brain suggests that I did learn that terminology long, long ago, somewhere far, far away .... but I honestly do not remember ever hearing it used in the wild. I was only in commercial printing for a few years, on and off. Today, I only do my own stationary, business cards and the like ... and I do invitations etc. for friends and family, at cost. Free for brides-to-be.

The ::mercy snip:: was because ElReg wouldn't let the post through. Seems the added "Re:" made the subject line too long. Not intended as a slight on your post.

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

"In the days of typesetting by hand there was only one space after all punctuation."

Not in a properly prepared page of type.

When composing a stick of type, when you come to the end of a line, the compositor takes note of the final word, plus punctuation. If the final word, plus punctuation, fits the line being composed, the line is done. However, if the final word (plus punctuation) is too long, the compositor has the option of either hyphenating the word, with the hyphen being the last character on that line, or deciding the entire word will need to drop down a line. Either way, the compositor must now insert equal extra spacing between each word in the line, in order to justify the line. Note that these extra little bits of space must also be inserted between the period at the end of a sentence and the letter at the start of the next one, or between a comma, colon, semicolon (etc.) and the first letter of the next word.

So the spacing after punctuation varies, depending on how the justification works out.

Making these purely esthetic decisions is part of the art of hand-set type.

Re: Some things never change

"It was almost always easier to get it into plain text first, then sort it out from there."

That's why I always type everything out in vi, and wait until it's (nearly) finished before feeding it into a program to format it.

Which program? Depends on where it's going next.

Re: No convert

"it became a pain to print out function key templates"

That has got to be the epitome of a First World Problem.

It's Friday, and it's 94F(35C(ish)). This round's on me.

::Insert mandatory "But ASCII-7 doesn't exist, there is only ASCII" gripe here.::

Re: Tab and return

"so you have to press the «return» key to return the platen"

What is this thing you call a "return key"[0]? My Royal has a bloody great lever on the left hand side that I have to shove to the right to return the carriage to the first column. It advances the paper a line, too, if I ask it to. Or two lines. Or three or four, depending on the preferences of whoever has control of the Big Red Pencil (and sometimes Blue).

[0] You must have one of those fancy-schmancy electric typewriters.

Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"

Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are far, far too ingenious.

Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"

"or did their photocopiers destroy the originals?"

Badly adjusted machines often tried ... I can't tell you how many times in the late 70s and early 80s I'd put a stack of paper in the machine, tell it to give me 10 copies, pick up my ten neatly collated & stapled copies ... and discover the originals were folded, wrinkled, torn, smeared with toner[0], and otherwise mutilated.

[0] On the originals side‽ WTF‽‽

Foil stamping and (foil) embossing and die cutting are also a good reason to get a Windmill, should you wish to pursue this as a fairly lucrative hobby. I have a friend who does wedding invites and the like out of his garage. Only works two days a week, goes fishing the other five.

You don't even need a cutter ... all the stock sizes (including pre-made envelopes) are available from your local paper dealer. Dies for foil (and foil embossing) are also available in standard "bells and birds and hearts" ... as is pretty much any colo(u)r of foil and ink. All you need is the one press, and a gift of the gab. Allow the Bride to "design" her invites out of the catalogs, she'll be absolutely thrilled with her very own custom order.

Note that the Windmill can handle very small sizes of paper ... Printing individual business cards with it is easy.

Bindery is an art-form unto it's own.

I didn't do it by hand.

I used vi as gawd/ess intended.

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

"That was an inheritance from 19th century typesetting, which used an “en” quadrat (AKA a “nutt”, which was typically around twice the width of a font’s standard word-separating space) as whitespace following the end of a sentence, even with proportional fonts."

Kinda. An em is equal to the height of the font. And en is half that. So for 16 point type, an en is 8 points. A quadrat is simply a non-printing square. An em-quadrat in 16 point type results in whitespace that is 16 points on a side. The en-quadrat in the same scenario would be 16 points high, but half that in width.

Or, as John Southward put it in his series of articles in "Printers' Register" from 1870 to 1871, reprinted in 1875 as "A Dictionary of Typography And its Accessory Arts" (transcribed by me, from the above mentioned 1875 Second Edition .... all typoes mine):

Quadrats

Pieces of type metal, of the depth of the body of the respective sizes to which they are cast, but lower than types, so as to leave a blank space on the paper, when printed while they are placed.

An en quadrat is half as thick as its depth; an em quadrat is equal in thickness and depth, and being square on its surface, is the true quadrat (from quadratus, squared); a two em quadrat is twice the thickness of its depth; a three em three times, a four em four times, as their names specify. Four ems are the largest quadrats that are cast. They are used to fill out short lines to form white lines, and to justify letters, figures, &c., in any part of the line or page. Four-em quadrats are rarely cast larger than Pica. English and Great Primer do not exceed three ems, nor does Double Pica exceed two ems.

In casting em and en quadrats the utmost exactness is necessary; they also require particular care in dressing, as the most trifling variation will instantly be discovered when they are ranged in figure work; and unless true in their justification, the arrangement will be so irregular, that all the pains and ingenuity of a compositor cannot rectify it. The first line of a paragraph is usually indented an em quadrat, but some printers prefer using an em and on. two, or oven three ems for wide measures, An em quadrat is the proper space after a full point when it terminates a sentence in a paragraph. En quadrats normally used after a semicolon, colon, &c., and sometimes after overhanging letters.

He then goes on to discuss circular and curved quadrats, how to properly join and justify them, and other interesting but long forgotten lore ... but I'll spare you. If you are interested in this kind of thing, I highly recommend you try to find a copy of the book mentioned above. (There was a reprint in 2018, but I'm sure it doesn't smell right. IYKYJK)

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

I do not know the term "nutt", as used in this context. Can you offer up a reference? I collect such trivia.

"Well done to the original typesetters for getting it onto the pages."

Just as an aside, composing with lead type is fun, and somewhat meditative. See if there is a Uni in your area that still teaches this arcane art form, and if so take a class. I'll bet you a plugged nickel you'll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps even hooked.

Re: It can be worse!

"they wanted a three column layout"

One word: PageMaker.

The only reason I ever saw fit to use a Mac. Good for single page fliers, IOMs, student newsletters, brochures and the like. For anything more complex, I used LaTeX. Still do, in fact. Old & clunky, to be sure, but my fingers know it.

Re: Under construction

Shirley you mean <blink>Under Construction</blink> ...

As for being pedantic, I prefer "not forgetting history, lest we are doomed to repeat it" (to paraphrase Santayana).

Regardless of what the fanbois have to (not) say on the subject, there is a direct line of progression from the first two 1822 protocol connected & talking IMPs in 1969 to every one of today's pointy-clicky TCP/IP driven intrawebtube delights.

"the early days of the internet with people creating homepages in FrontPage Express"

Front Page was released in '95, the Express version in '97. The Internet is a couple decades older than that. The NCP version of the network started in late '69, Flag Day for the TCP/IP version was January 1st, 1980.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Re: Computing smarts in the cloud

Sounds like something he might have said in private, when the Marketing Department wasn't pulling his strings.

Re: Thin client, slim pickings

WTF? 950 open tabs?? And 300 is NORMAL???

Have you never heard of bookmarks?

Re: Some concerns though

"Or is this all about ego?"

In my case, it's selfishness.

I wanted an OS that would free up MY time, with minimal support for my end users. It worked.

Soon after installing the version of Slackware that I came up with, my Dad jokingly suggested that I re-install XP on my techno-phobic Mom's computer, because they never saw me anymore now that she's running Slackware. I took it as a non-joke, and now the Wife and I make sure we alternate visiting my Great Aunt (running the same version of Slackware) and my parents on a regular basis. The only difference is that I get to visit with them, instead of working on their computers while my wife visits.

Re: Some concerns though

"But, with all these distros are there really enough devs to support them all?"

Who cares? If you want support, get a distro with a support contract. If not, don't. It's about choice.

Or, you can choose to go where the Marketing Department in Redmond (Cupertino, London, Raleigh ... ) wants you to go today.

Re: Some concerns though

I built a distro, based on Slackware, for MeDearOldMum and Great Aunt. Now my Wife uses it too, instead of a full-blown Slackware install. They've all been happily using it for a dozen(ish) years. As have many other family members, friends, and current and ex students of mine.

And yet in your mind, I wasted my time building it.

You really, really need to take three steps back and look at what you are saying.

"and would probably have been no harder"

Possibly easier, in fact. For example, updating firmware shouldn't require any OS at all.

Re: Do they really?

You beat me to it.

Beer?

Re: Do they really?

"It is because the tools we need just do not exist for Linux."

Bullshit. I run several interlocked businesses using Linux. It's actually easier, and takes less of my time, than doing similar in Windows.

Windows is a time-sink, and time is money.

Re: Do they really?

How many times has Microsoft made major changes in their desktop in the ten years you've been using Ubuntu at work?

Re: Do they really?

"Believe me, I've tried."

Then you are not trying very hard. Make a business case for it. They will listen to bottom line. I make part of my living doing just this, and have done for about a quarter century.

"Unless there is a single Linux desktop release that can kill Windows stone dead in every possible metric people won't change. It's too scary and they're too resistant."

Keep telling convincing yourself that is true, and it'll automagically be true. For you, anyway.

Re: Do they really?

"Mint, Zorin and something with KDE, say Kubuntu."

Those are all essentially the same distro.

How about Mint, Devuan and something with KDE, say Slackware?

Re: Do they really?

Better, compare Win11 with Win2K.

Win2K was peak Microsoft. It's all been downhill from there.

Re: Choosing to choose

"Despite MS fiddling about with the UI through various reskins, it's been the same over the years with the same familiar applications."

On the contrary. Witness that every time MS rolls out a UI rev, businesses all over the world spend hundreds of millions, if not billions, on re-training their users.

I only had to show MeDearOldMum and Great Aunt how the version of Slackware I built for them works once. Three major releases, 5 minor releases and a dozen(ish) years ago.

Re: Windows is also in the schools and Universities

Cupertino invented the school license, not Redmond.

Am I the only one who remembers Guy Kawasaki saying in a marketing meeting for the original Macintosh "Let's get it into schools, and get the kids hooked on it! It'll be better than heroin!"?

Re: Shell-shock-trauma (of sorts)

vi makes 300 fairly painless in a pinch. Yes, I said makes.

I still connect over dial-up from my property in rural Mendocino county about 20% of the time, usually at about 9600 ... but sometimes at speeds as low as 300 (sea fog and aging, cracked, dusty cable plant with copper stretched to its distance limit makes for bad signal to noise ratio) ... And that's barely 200 miles by road from Silly Con Valley.

Truthfully, when it gets much slower than 1200, I usually disconnect and wait for the sun to dry things out. No great loss.

_{Mine's the one with the Telebit Trailblazer in one pocket & floppy with Kermit code in the other ...}

"They want Windows crushed and bleeding underneath the Linux juggernaut."

That is an invention of prattling children.

Quite frankly, I don't give a shit about Windows. It is completely irrelevant to me, and has been for well over 20 years on a personal basis[0], and over a dozen on a professional and "friends and family support" level. If it went away tomorrow, I probably wouldn't be affected at all.

I use Linux and BSD because they work the way I need and want them to. Windows, more often than not, did not, so I shit-canned it. ... The Slackware distribution, once customized to suit me, blissfully gets out of the way and allows me to do general purpose computing as I need it to ... including making a variation that is friendly to my computer illiterate DearOldMum and Great Aunt, and computer end-user Wife. Can't ask for much more than that out of an OS.

[0] One exception ... the lone, air-gapped Win2K machine running AutoCAD2K, which I still haven't managed to find the time to fully extract myself from.

AWS says it will cloudify your mainframe workloads

One wonders if these geniuses ...

... has any clue as to the massive I/O capability of the common or garden Mainframe.

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

Re: A statistician would argue ....

Single celled organisms can fossilize quite well, actually. Ever been to the White Cliffs of Dover?

However, here's an interesting paper on some somewhat older fossils:

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/112179/1/ppnature21377_Dodd_for%20Symplectic.pdf

Re: asteroid Ryugu reportedly contain 20 amino acids

Aminos labeled "space dust" and "star dust" and the like were being sold as human supplements by quacks back in the '70s. This was after it was confirmed that the Murchison Meteorite did, indeed, contain aminos in 1971, which (naturally) was all over the news. I remember my dad commenting on how fast the charlatans picked up the idea.

Re: But then the free thinker / crank / conspiracy theorist would argue ....

Young cobollers aren't yet realistic enough, ironic enough, sarcastic enough, nor paranoid enough, to be universes.

_{There are young cobollers, I mentor a few. But they are a dying breed. Be afraid. Very afraid ...}

Re: A statistician would argue ....

"plenty of evidence of high intelligence among 'primitive' and 'early' peoples - quite possibly at least as high as ours."

Uh, dude, you do realize that if you brought a baby in from the pate paleolithic and raised it as a modern child, chances are good nobody would know the difference between him and his peers. Look up "anatomically modern human", and try to remember that includes the brain. Even among old stone-age humans.

Re: But then the free thinker / crank / conspiracy theorist would argue ....

"The universes are all a load of old cobollers."

FTFY

_TINOC

Icons don't help much when a large portion of your audience is perfectly happy dishing it out, but can't take similar humo(u)r in return.

Majority of Axon's AI ethics board resigns over CEO's taser drones

Re: This isn't a solution...

I neither said, nor implied any such thing. Please re-read what I have written, this time for content.

Hold on, there, chief.

Nobody's spending tens of thousands on anything yet. Far from it, in fact pretty much everybody is poo-pooing the idea, if not outright laughing at the idiot for suggesting it.

I like Jonathon Green.

He's so predictable.

Re: Just too many guns

What does the quantity of any kind of weapon have to do with anything? All a loonie needs is one, and the opportunity. In my mind taking away the loonie's opportunity would be a lot easier than taking away all available weapons.

Re: This isn't a solution...

I think I see why you want to keep loonies on the streets.

Re: This isn't a solution...

I agree with what you wrote (which is just a small window into the entire issue), but I disagree that banning one weapon of many available is a valid way to put an end to the problem.

Re: This isn't a solution...

I want to take the loonies off the streets BEFORE they can act, instead of removing one inanimate object out of many that they can use to lash out. This is having issues, in your mind?

Re: The answer isn't getting rid of guns

If we take care of the loonie problem, the problem will evaporate.

If we get rid of guns, we'll still have loonies out there, probably finding new ways to kill kids. (Tim McVeigh don't need any guns to destroy a nursery school, for one example.)

You really want to give the loonies a chance to kill kids? I sure as hell don't ... I want them off the streets where they can't hurt anybody. Who's the sick fuck?

Re: This isn't a solution...

Most of the loonies announced themselves prior to their actions. Nobody paid attention. This is a problem, and one that needs addressing.

I agree that the current Republican leadership are another part of the problem.

Said loonie in a room full of kids hasn't (to date) had a fully automatic "assault rifle" (whatever that is!), they have semi-auto rifles. A quibble, you say? Perhaps ... but your incorrect assumption certainly colo(u)rs your perception of reality, and feeds your fears.