Posts by Bitbeisser

40 years of Turbo Pascal, the coding dinosaur that revolutionized IDEs

Re: Amiga Version

Do you have any link/reference to this "Turbo Pascal for Amiga"? Because I haven't seen one...

Re: Turbo Pascal clone - by Microsoft!

And QuickPascal wasn't actually developed by Microsoft, but bought up from some French guy(s) to have a competing product. But it was too little too late for Microsoft...

Somewhat of a weird article. I used Anders' compiler when it still was called PolyPascal. And I am not aware that back then, Turbo Pascal was available for anything but Z80 CPU & CP/M-80 as the OS as well as 8086 and DOS (and CP/M-86).

And 64KB was the maximum address space on a Z80&CP/M-80 and even on a PC, a lot of machines in '83 had rarely more than 128 or 256KB of RAM. So that COM (tiny) memory model was quite sufficient, beside that it supported overlays. It was also a compromise to the speed of generation, as it didn't create OBJ files but created directly binary code that got copied to the end of the runtime system.

Yes, Turbo 4 was a complete rewrite, and by that time, PCs had also developed quite a bit, so a compiler could take advantage of more than the one 64KB segment of the COM memory model....

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

"As for "hundreds " - the number is in the thousands, even now. There are individual HP-UX sites with nearly a thousand machines. I would guess there are at least a thousand OpenVMS/IPF sites and at least two thousand running UX. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are 2-3 times that. (Remember that while VMS is available on x86 now, the ISV ecosystem still largely is not - Rdb for instance.)"

Even thousands of Itaniums still running are not even a droplet in the ocean of computing these days. It was even a niche within a niche at its best times.

And you mentioned those vast numbers of thousands of Itanium machines running HP-UX and OpenVMS, which just underlines that there is no real need for Itanium support in Linux. How many Linux distribution ever seriously where offered? And how many instances of those?

Raspberry Pi 5: Hot takes and cooler mistakes

When I saw the announcement of the Pi5 (I think it was some quotes from Upton) is said that the Pi5 DOES need a cooler, that it is no longer optional....

And now for something completely different: Python 3.12

Python is among my least favorite programming languages, regardless what everyone else says.

The only form of Python that I enjoy is that of (past) British humor...

Terraform fork OpenTF renamed and relocated as OpenTofu

Re: Tofu

soft, firm or extra-firm? :P

Activist investor to GoDaddy: Cut costs, improve sales, or sell

Re: Hey! El' Reg!

Well, they could use a vulture, if there would be a reference to this very site... ;-)

Lawyer's Microsoft email snafu goes from $1.75M lawsuit to Ctrl+Alt+Settle

Re: Typical lawyering

Where's the surprise? It's a lawyer, they are usually in for the money only anyway....

Oracle disappoints market with revenue miss as Ellison hints at Azure database move

Re: Am I reading this right?

Yeah, that statement (and the stock market reaction) is totally bonkers!

They miss the hedge fund vultures' (no offense intended to anyone associated with El Reg LOL) estimates by 0.16% and their market valuation drops by 9% (it's all "funny money" anyway). Seriously?

As much as I despise Evil Larry and his minions, this is just nonsense....

The Anti Defamation League is Musk's latest excuse for Twitter's tanking ad revenue

Re: Ad revenue tanking

I think he is a prime example for the fact that too much of that Devil's lettuce mushes up your brain...

Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea

Re: huh?

A new episode of "Cruise ships gone wild"?

Profits just keep rolling in at T-Mobile US. So only thing to do is axe 5,000 workers

This is just utter bollocks.

I am a long time Sprint client, who was then transferred over to T-Mobil. And then things immediately started to go south. No longer able to pay my bill in person on a kiosk in the store. Used to be a nice thing under Sprint, in and out and done in 60 secs.

Then stores started to close left and right, some before, some after being rebranded. An hour wait to pay a bill (no, I do NOT pay online, don't bother mentioning). Then more stores (corporate and franchise) closing. Bill kept increasing. Now they add even another $5 each time I want to pay my bill in a store. But T-Mobil is making $2.2billion of profit in 90 days? How much taxes are they paying on that?

Seriously, corporate America has gone fully postal and totally out of touch with the reality of it's customers....

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Sorry Liam, but StarWriter was never a CP/M software. Marco founded StarDivision in 1985 (16 years old), when CP/M wasn't really a thing anymore...

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?

OneDrive is the spawn of evil. It is the worst of all places to have your data at. The sheer audacity of Microsoft to decide what to back up and actually MOVING all YOUR data to the cloud, removing everything from your local device is downright criminal....

Re: Why is it the company's responsibility to make backups of the customer's data?

Why would anyone need to make backups??? All the data is in the cloud, it is safe.

Or so the marketing lore goes.

Sorry, I have that very fight a lot with clients, with only a small number actually realizing how they could be effected when they do not have a current "offline" backup of their data.

Verizon to 'sunset' Blue Jeans vidconf platform

Re: $500 million

Well, apparently, a lot of businesses were using it, as they are/were able to "brand" it to their own company.

Rather questionable feature IMHO, but then some guys in suites are all about branding, rather than technical functionality....

With a technically subpar product. The web client is hamstringed and even with the desktop app, it can take easily 10-15min to actually connect.

Microsoft kicks Calibri to the curb for Aptos as default font

Well, looks like a new fresh wind is blowing through Microsoft. After all the previous product updates featuring always new icons and/or emojis as the headliner, looks like they come up with something new and vaguely more relevant...

Mystery Intel bug halts shipments of some Sapphire Rapids Xeons

Well, there were times when humans used sharp stones to shape sharp sticks for their tools. Nowadays, tools are created by sophisticated CNC machines/robots.

The evolution of processors over the last 50 years is pretty much equivalent to the evolution of human tools from the stone ages to today....

Microsoft postpones death date for personally licensed Teams Rooms hardware

Re: Is there anyone out there who actually thinks Teams is as great as MS does?

Come on, that's ain't fair. Comparing Teams with the one conferencing tool (BlueBeam) that managed to be worse than Teams. Oh wait, there's (Don't)GotoMeeting still around...

Apple stomped all over NYC store workers' union rights, judge rules

Re: Land of the free

The problem you try to describe is much rather a more general problem with the way unions (nowadays) work in the US of A.

I am not against organizing a work force to be able to stand up against corporate exploitation, but there are far too many examples of unions turning into an extortion and work-avoidance scheme.

Organizing to get fair wages, working hours, work place safety, that are all fine and noble causes. But there are also unions that are dictating who can work, how much they can work and extort businesses, like it is the case with the longshoremen and in the movie/TV business here in LA, that is something that IMHO should be avoided at all cost....

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

Yeah, that single disks, SSD or not, out of a datacenter, would be readable to a single file level just doesn't smell right. In case of any RAID or object level storage setup, this should be hard to impossible, regardless of encryption applied or not...

BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus

Re: reading without comprehension

She is/was THAT old?

Why Microsoft just patched a patch that squashed an under-attack Outlook bug

Re: Security fail by design

Those days fell by the wayside when someone thought it was a good idea to use a web browser to read and write emails. WebMail started to screw it up for all of us, ever since...

Re: Value to users

> Barnea wrote that he hoped Microsoft will remove the custom reminder sound feature, saying it poses more security risks than any potential value to users.

But look at the bright side, Microsoft comes out with new icons every other week. Or so....

India bans open source messaging apps for security reasons. FOSS community says good luck

Re: India....

There is too much baksheesh to be made from those guys....

Your security failure was so bad we have to close the company … NOT!

Why would this be a lie? It just makes it clear that this didn't happen in the US of A...

Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

Re: Interesting clash between US corporate oligarch feudalism and Liberte, Egality et Fraternite

There was nothing socialist in 1933 but in name. More or less clever marketing, nothing else...

>> Right! What world do you live in, where the streets of London are paved with gold?

> Tipperary

Now that's a long way....

Salesforce boss Benioff scores payday of nearly $30m amid cost cutting

The moment the article mentioned "activist investors", I think it is clear that SalesForce is doomed.

Once those vultures sink their talons in the body, they rip you apart until just bare bones are left out to dry and wither....

The end of Microsoft-brand peripherals is only Surface deep

Could never care for those (un)ergonomic keyboards. Or the mice, much rather used the Logitech originals.

But it is sad not to have the option to get clients any HD 5000 web cams anymore. Those were for those $30 the best choice by far. They just worked. Plug&Play,, no praying necessary...

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Yeah, had of those "random" problems once too. Working in a small computer repair shop, one day a local customer down the street brought a computer in. Said it was brand new and would always crash after running for 15-20 min. Put it up on our workbench a bit later and was playing with the computer for half an hour. No crash. Let it sit busy with the screensaver for the rest of the day, no crash. Customer picked the computer up just before closing. Came back the next morning, and 3 more times, always the same, claiming it would crash after those 15-20min.Was working just peachy fine in our shop. The last time he brought it in, on Saturday, he sat himself at our workbench for a couple hours. No crash. Took it home and called half an hour later. It had crashed and rebooted again. As we were just closing the store, I went over to his house a couple of blocks away. Nice home office in a covered, converted patio. He turned the computer back on when I came in and presto, a few minutes later, it rebooted. While the machine came back up, he lamented that he started to think that his place was cursed. While talking, me telling him that I noticed a flickering in the lighting, after that roughly 15min time span, his wife walked into the room and down a narrow staircase inside. When she opened up the door, to a room under the former pattio, the computer crashed and rebooted again. But this time, I did not only notice the light flickering, but also noticed the sound of the compressor of a large freezer in that basement room kicking in. Turned out that the freezer was on the same electrical circuit as his office upstairs and the draw of the freezer kicking in was enough to cause a brownout and subsequent reboot of the computer upstairs. Had an electrician first thing on Monday morning separate the circuits and that computer worked happily ever after...

Nostalgic for VB? BASIC is anything but dead

Interesting that you decided to include Bywater BASIC but on the other hand completely ignored Rob Hagemann's PC-BASIC (https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/).

Yeah, I know it is written in Python, but I wouldn't hold that against it... ;-)

Journalist hurt by exploding USB bomb drive

In the US of A (and probably a lot of EU countries) this isn't likely to work. As all mail (unless it is kind of hand delivered by courier) and AFAIK also small packages via UPS, FedEx, DHL are being send through a scanner at the sorting facilities these days that will detect explosives (specially RDX, C4, Semtex), as well as things like Anthrax, so it wouldn't actually reach the intended target in the first place.

Ferrari in a spin as crims steal a car-load of customer data

Marked myself safe from the Ferrari data exploit...

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

Nonsense. The GDR used actually some of the worst offenders who survived the war. It was just all smoke and mirrors behind the iron curtain...

Re: @beardman - Let the Russian people decide

But it seems they still haven't learned a thing...

Enter Tinker: Asus pulls out RISC-V board it hopes trumps Raspberry PI

$280? Sorry, but that isn't even remotely in the league of a RPi...

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Never really gave it a thought.

For quite a while now, I am using Ninite.com to download real browsers and a bunch of other utilities onto new installed Windows systems, and use the same downloaded file to later update those tools in more or less regular intervals. Won't get any annoying banners or pop-ups this way. Well, maybe once, when changing the default browser...

Landlord favorite Twitter sued for allegedly not paying rent on Market Square HQ

Looks like the musky boi is taking a chapter from Dolt45's business practices. And in turn is probably putting all of his endeavors putting in danger...

Crims steal data on 40 million T-Mobile US customers

Re: What?

>because I have not had a T-Mobile account since at least 25 years ago

Well, now that's a feat right there. Considering that T-Mobile was founded in 1999 in Germany and is operating in the US of A since 2001...

Microsoft is checking everyone's bags for unsupported Office installs

Re: > Is there anything creepier than religious zealots, really?

>> Is there anything creepier than religious zealots, really?

>Yes: Corporate Zealots

In which category does Scientology then fall under? Or would that be Corporate religious zealots?

Re: Seeking out competition

Well, if they do that, this is likely to increase the people so fed up with Microsoft and Windows that we might finally see the year of Linux on the desktop...

Re: Death to subscriptions

I am using LibreOffice exclusively (Ok, might have OpenOffice initially) for at least 15 years or so.

Much less frustration...

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

Re: Microsoft Defender ASR snafu.

>I think you need to get a Grep of yourself

kill -9 ???

Re: Are you ok?

Well, after your first paragraph, I don't think you could be referred to as a "model parent" but rather what is commonly known as a "helicopter parent"

Also, after reading further, I call bullshit on your story overall, as "two years ago", you would hardly been able to buy a "brand new Compaq", as that brand was discontinued by HP back in 2013 and is only licensed for trademark use by 3rd parties overseas...

And skimming over the rest of the rather longish post of yours, I am not sure if this whole post was an attempt at sarcastic parody. If that was your intention, I think you failed. Miserably...

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

Re: Bit ridiculous

Yeah, that old lady gets already involved in far too many affairs....

Re: Bit ridiculous

More over, the name Apache has been used for the web server for 28 years by now, but only NOW they are complaining...

Seriously, as someone mentioned in another thread, there seem to be too many "professionally offended"...

FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down

Re: "but which aren't known about enough in advance to publicize by other means"

Yeah, that whole gender/pronoun nonsense is a major PITA for all of mankind...