Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
IMHO it was RiscOS that really made those things. It was light years ahead of anything else available at the time. I mean in 1987 your options were what, TOS, System 5, Windows 2.0, amigaOS 1.4?
That being said, I have no idea how many of the capabilities of RiscOS were down to the underlying architecture and wouldn't have been possible on other designs of the era.
Maybe just being cautious. Some of these benchmark figures appear too good to be true - and when things appear too good to be true, they usually aren't true.
I really hope that the Apple silicon is everything Apple claim it is, because regardless of how I feel about Apple (and dear gods do I _hate_ Apple) competition is good. If they can force the x86 boys to up their game then so much the better, but until I've had a couple of weeks to collect a good spread of numbers from a bunch of different sources I'm going to remain skeptical.
Remember how good Netburst looked on paper when it was first debuted before we all found out what the thermal performance was like and how despite the unprecedented (for the time) clock speeds, everything tanked when the branch prediction failed?
I'm really interested to see if this is going to take us back to a time when we genuinely didn't know which way to jump when buying a computer. x86 won SO HARD in the 90s. MOS technologies was long dead. The moto 68xxx chips died off in the Atari and Amiga and Apple jumped ship. Acorn struggled along in the British classroom, but finally withered way.... Are we going to have another architecture war? Do we need to start caring about what the underlying hardware is again?
Interesting times.
Bang on. Basic is the worst language in the world... except... it's really not. It got millions of us into programming when we were young because you could just spit out a simple program and watch a computer *do a thing* without actually really understanding it. Python is just the same, but 35 years later. It might not be a language you'd want to use for a serious project, but we owe it some respect for the fact that people can just jump in and start using it. It's accessible.
The "We're moving bitbucket to the cloud, it'll be great!" thing is actually forcing us to stop using bitbucket (not that I'm complaining) the the whole point was we're storing utterly vast and rapidly changing datasets in the thing and not thrashing it up and down our internet link was the entire point of setting up the service in house in the first place.
The goal was pretty simple. Quell a bunch of annoying infighting in the Conservative party by letting a bunch of tedious chest thumping media whores with no political significance and no actual message other than "Britain is so great! Foreigners are so bad!" have a referendum that they would then lose.
This would be a win for the leadership of the Conservative party, because they could take the referendum and use it as a nice big stick to hit people like Boris Johnson with. "You lost, now shut up with your whining!" and it would be great for the media whores, because they didn't really have anything to do except whine about how Britain wasn't as good as it used to be, and as long as we were a member of the EU they could do that to their hearts content without actually having to do anything about it. You know, difficult things like have policies instead of sound bytes.
Unfortunately it all went terribly, terribly wrong and the leave campaign actually won. No one had a plan for that, and as a result... /gestures broadly at the entire state of UK politics.
...was getting sent to handle an irate conference guest who insisted that despite what they had been told, there was no internet socket in their room (These being the days before ubiquitous wifi.) The socket in question was in fact on the wall just above and behind the desk, right next to the power socket they had left their laptop charger plugged into.
Since the person in question wasn't there when I showed up, my response was to use yellow electrical tape to put an extremely large arrow on the wall pointing to it.
...but I already bought a Cosmo, which fulfills my "I need a little portable SSH terminal" needs even better. Sadly it doesn't make a very good _phone_ because the battery doesn't really last long enough and it's a bit big - this would certainly do the job of "One device for work and home" much better, but well... I already have the cosmo and carrying 2 devices isn't _that_ much of a problem when I only use one of them occasionally and tend to only take it places I expect to need it.
(This post from the pub, where I am _technically_ still working)
It's certainly the most sold I've ever used. We have a few hundred of the things at work and they've been rock solid. That said, when people took them all home at the beginning of lockdown we got the opportunity to test them with a massive variety of random display hardware all of a sudden, not so much. I now have at least a dozen cases of macs simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of various external displays, or in some cases setting obviously incorrect resolutions / refresh rates and then refusing to even display the controls you would use to change them.
Don't get me wrong, it's still by _far_ the best OS I've used for handling multi-headed setups, but it's not as flawless as I first thought when I'd only ever used it in a controlled envrionment.
Snaps really are the wrong answer to a question almost nobody was asking. I get what they _thought_ they were trying to achieve, you just bang this little container down in it's own walled garden and there's no way for it to make a mess of anything else that might be installed on your system. No dependency problems. No uninstall issues.
But outside utterly trivial cases, I never, ever want to do that on a linux box, and for the trivial cases... well... I don't _need_ any of that extra security. Anything I install I'm going to want to configure in some way, and now there's this tedious abstraction layer in between me and what ought to just be sitting in /etc/ or /var/lib
It sort of makes sense for desktop applications that are kinda fire-and-forget installs, but that's not really what I use linux for, and I the people who _do_ use linux like that just plain don't _care_ how their application got installed.
The problem here as I see it is that like a bunch of microsoft products it does a ton of things it has no business doing. The correct response should be "piss off that's not what this is for" but for some reason every time someone says "Hey, I want to do <pick a thing> with Excel" microsoft just decide that implementing the most half-assed possible way of doing that thing is the right answer as opposed to saying "No."
See also the fact that Word is for some reason a web browser, and that Outlook does.... sort of everything that outlook does.
Energy density is sort of a massive deal when doing heavier than air flight. Every kilo of fuel you're carrying is a kilo of something you actually wanted to move about (be that people or cargo) that you're not. Not only is hydrogen significantly less energy dense than Jet Fuel, the storage cells needed to keep it liquid are much heavier than a typical fuel tank required for traditional fuels.
The laws of physics say something has to give somewhere. If we're going to give over 1/4 of the cargo volume to carrying fuel instead, flying is going to have to get a lot more expensive. Maybe that's inevitable, but if it _is_ I'm not sure hydrogen planes are the best value way of spending the extra money in terms of keeping things moving vs not producing a ton of greenhouse emissions.
Having spent months trying to jump through all the hoops required to get our org registered as an official developer I 100% agree with this statement. It's not that they're actually asking anything unusual, it's that they're impossible to communicate with. Oh, sorry, that person you were dealing with has moved department. Start over. Oh, you've moved official business address because you've moved to a new office? Start over. Because of covid we've changed the procedure. Start over. It's like they are actively looking for excuses not to talk to you at every step of the process.
I really hope that actually happens. I'd enjoy the few days of peace where I don't have to check the thing in case someone has decided that for some reason it's better to message me through that abomination than just fucking call or text me and ask if I want to get a beer tonight.
I really want rid of the thing, but it's almost the only way a large number of people I know chose to communicate for some reason.
Consoles have historically beaten PC's on price/performance because people writing games could get super close to the bare metal since they knew exactly what that was going to be. Any performance loss from lower specifications could be made up with much more efficient coding since there was no "Well, we have no idea what hardware you're actually using, so here's a massive abstraction layer" in play.
Clearly that's no longer the case, and the vast majority of games are going to be written using existing game engines with the intent that they will sell cross platform anyway, so honestly - in what way is this not just a small form factor PC?
If you have a paper trail for every vote then I say who cares if the software running the machines is open source. Just have a requirement to conduct random hand recounts of a statistically significant percentage to verify the totals and you know the machines are counting accurately.
No! No no no no no no no!
So that machine has to print two copies of that - one for the voter so they can check and one to go in the ballot box for the theoretical recount. The voter obviously needs to be prevented from touching the latter, or they could deliberately vote for the wrong candidate and then tamper with the "log" paper vote to try and get the election invalidated.
So, now we have 2 paper ballots, and the voter can't see that they're the same - and that's assuming that the voter even bothers to check the one they were given.
Never trust. Never. EVER.
I don't disagree that there are way more effective voter suppression tactics already in use - but imagine what happens should those be cracked down upon by some theoretical future honest administration. There's still a massive opening for someone to mass manipulate votes as long as these stupid, wasteful, pointless things remain in use.
Don't make me post the Tom Scott video again.
Same. And they were absolutely bloody indestructible. I dropped mine in a mosh pit at a gig in Rock City back in the day. It spent the rest of the night getting kicked around the dance floor where it separated into 2 pieces - that is to say the battery, and the rest of it. Amazingly both bits were handed in at the bar and when I got them back at the end of the night all I had to do was attach the one to the other and it still worked perfectly.
...that was of a similar "ported forward from a minicomputer, running on a green-screen" type construction. It was comprised of a number of forms built out of multiple pages of text entry boxes - some of them 20 or 30 pages long. As you filled in these forms the only time you could save them was on the last page. You also couldn't go _back_ once you'd filled a page in except by pressing on, saving the entry, and then re-opening it for modification.
All of that was just plain bad UI design, but far worse was the way they handled buffering keyboard input - which is to say, they didn't - and if you were a proficient enough typist you could cause the thing to corrupt the current page by simply typing too fast. The "fix" for this that was implemented when we reported the problem was for them to add a keyboard shortcut that would flush all unsaved data and reload the current form.
Imagine typing fast enough to corrupt it on page 19 of a 20 page form that you've not saved yet and the only thing to do is press alt+ctrl+q and lose the last 20 minutes work...
God I hated that thing.
For sure there's some fetishization... I'm sure that's not a word, but I'm gonna roll with it... going on here. The whole "Look, it's a green and black CRT!" option is clearly some kind of fan service - although I'm not sure what kind.
But you know what, there's nothing really wrong with a bit of nostalgia, but that's not really the point I was trying to make. How, with a gui, do you loop over every member of group a, check if they're in some other group b, if they are add them also to group c as well as drop a few files in their home directory and send them an email telling them that it's happened?
There really isn't a better way to do random arbitrary tasks like that than an old fashioned text shell, and odd corner case shit happens all the time in the devops world where basically everything is made out of the digital equivalent of string and duct tape.
Another one - rename every file in this directory to an MD5 hash of it's content if and only if the MD5 matches the hash of another file in another directory on a remote server. I actually had to do that last week. It took about 5 lines of bash. No one in their right mind would ever write a GUI tool to do something like that it's just too niche.
You're not wrong about things often being arbitrary - but then trying to find things in the Windows control panel isn't exactly an object lesson in logical structure these days - and yes, there's very much an anglocentric nature to 99% of text shells - but then since they were pretty much all invented in the US, that's probably to be expected, and to be honest if English isn't your first language there's a better than even chance it's your second language and so there really isn't a better option - unless you're expecting a sudden resurgence in Esperanto?
Text shells fill a really important role, and I don't see any way for that role to be filled better.
We tried it, and most of it turned out to be rubbish.
In all seriousness tho, a huge amount of effort was put into making the good old "shell" an effective way of interacting with the machine. Since the arrival of the gui there has been huge amounts of effort poured into making the gui look cool, because that's way more attention grabbing than making it work better. With a text shell, you don't really have that option.
I fervently believe that gui development has been horrifically backsliding over the last few decades, with developers apparently more obsessed with what they can take out to make the thing look nicer, than what they should put in to make it work better.
...you could just not add a bunch of massive problems to the process of counting votes for absolutely no gain what so ever? I mean, paper, pencil, big clear plastic box... any of this ringing any bells? Pretty much impossible to manipulate on a bulk scale, been used successfully for hundreds of years? I mean, honestly, what does involving computers in this process improve in any way?
I ended up being rejected for the post of Senior sysadmin, twice, while applying for it from within the same organization. HR wanted someone with prior experience in a "senior" position and since my current title was only "Sysadmin" this meant I wasn't qualified.
The fact that I had been doing the job for nearly 2 years since we didn't currently _have_ a senior sysadmin apparently didn't matter because that didn't fit any of the check boxes on the "blind scoring" form they were supposed to use to prevent favoritism.
After 2 failed attempts to recruit a new person, they finally just changed my title and hired a new junior instead.
Look, you're not wrong. Google / Apple sure, their approach isn't perfect by any means - there's a good argument to be made that this whole thing is a folly and is never going to work because people will be uncooperative and just refuse to install the thing, or turn their phone off because they don't trust big-data / the gubbermint snooping on them.
Facetious spelling aside, I do appreciate that concern. I don't really trust Google, Apple or the British government with my data either.
But since apparently we're doing this shit regardless, how about we just go straight to the bit where we buy into the system at at least technically sort of works if everyone co-operates and then wait for it to fail when they don't as opposed to the one where we spend a few hundred million on filling contractors pockets first and then STILL have to go back to what pretty much everyone else did?
...you just put links to things you want run at startup in the startup folder and the job was done? One nice simple location, nothing in the way. Easy to read. Easy to write. Easy to understand.
There was one simple way and problems like this didn't happen. Every step we have taken away from that simple model has made things worse.
See also /etc/rc.d
The old ways were better. They weren't pretty, but they were better.
...because if I don't then somewhere down the line will come the "I'm sorry, this developer hasn't paid sufficient tribute for you to install this application - you will use one of the pre-selected highly profitable (for us) alternatives". They can dress that in whatever language they want, but that's what the popup will actually say, and small development houses and open source projects will be snuffed out. No, you can't use this perfectly good free application, you're going to $CORPORATION and you're installing their awful bloated, add infested, spyware infested "alternative" because they paid to get in this store, and the foss project didn't.
I'm having none of it.
(Finally massively lost my temper with Windows and binned it at home last month. It's still on my 2nd disk in the assumption that I will eventually want to play DooM Eternal, but thus far I've actually not wanted to have to deal with the annoyance of booting Windows again to *do* that)
It has them. They're in there. You have to desolder the USB controller to get at them. Come on guys, give us a pin header. Please? Think of all the cool things I could build if I could actually get at the PCIe lanes. I'd even take a "If you close this jumper it will disable the USB ports" to get at it.
Yes, but this is betamax vs VHS. It doesn't matter which is better, it matters what people actually bought. The simple fact is that MS Office won the office productivity suite format wars. Lotus is dead. Word Perfect is dead. MS Office is what we're stuck with. It doesn't matter if you or if I think it's any good (I personally don't) because it is a defacto standard and we just have no choice but to use the damn thing.
I don't want to run my Linux applications on Windows. I want to run my *Windows* applications on *Linux*. It's not the applications I have a problem with. They're not the pain in my ass that I'm trying to get rid of. Windows is the problem!
Windows "Oh, by the way I updated and broke a couple of your programs again without warning." is the problem.
Windows "We're using your bandwidth to apply windows updates to other users nearby - sorry, no, you can't turn that off." is the problem.
Windows "Hey look, all these great new apps came with the last 'Security' update, let me stick them in your start menu!" is the problem.
Windows "I know you had working drivers yesterday, but that was yesterday and we've got this fantastic new feature out that you *might* try some day, so we changed them without asking you" is the problem.
Windows "I'm afraid I can't shut down right now, because I've got a hung process that doesn't belong to your session for some reason." is the problem.
Windows "You're gonna have to buy a CAL for every user who *might* access the system regardless of if they actually do" is the problem.
WINDOWS is the problem.
If I could run the MS office suite entirely on Linux with 100% feature parity, that would be the end of Windows in my org, and if I could run my entire steam library without the cursed thing that would be the end of it at home too.
I don't think "Malt Liquor" is a thing in the UK. Most beer here starts at about 4% and then heads upwards. Only specialist "low alcohol" stuff is less than 3. I can't remember the time I saw a beer that was less than 4% on a beer tap, and with the surge in popularity of craft brews there's an awful lot of 5.5 and 6% stuff about these days.
...and therefore not a solution at all. People won't use things that aren't MS branded and that extends from the senior executive level right down to the bottom. I've run into this every place I've worked - even one that was actually under a policy to *only* use foss software at the time. The policy was simply ignored for the office staff because they would without exception simply down tools and refuse to work with anything that wasn't Word / Excel / Outlook. Outlook particularly. You'll prise outlook from an office drone's cold, dead hands.
It literally does not matter how good an alternative is or isn't. There are office managers, and PA's and accountants and all other kinds of back-office staff who have been using MS office for their entire 20 year careers now, and they will not change unless absolutely forced to, and that's not going to happen because their managers are in exactly the same position.
