Posts by Doctor Syntax 42409 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Although the 68000 was used in consumer kit I think its main significance was its use in small Unix servers such as the NCR Tower. In that part of the market MIPS was also a competitor in those days. Together with the Z8000 they got Unix into small businesses well before the Intel stuff won out aided by the cost advantage of being able to use PC components for most of the functionality (apart from cards with multiple RS-232 ports, of course).
"They won't support Linux until there is enough demand"
Central and local government of the EU* countries adds up to a pretty substantial demand if the EU stops talking and starts acting. Consider the effect of the EU putting out a call for offers of S/W to run on Linux with the equivalent functionality of $NamedProductOfReluctantVendor for however however many seats that might be. Who do you think would be first in the queue? Very likely $ReluctantVendor offering a port of the the product.
* Yes, I'd like to see the UK do that as well but I despair of them even more than I despair of the EU.
"Unless a business has an ideological reason to prefer FLOSS, there's no real incentive to use it, except for if they already have a decent contingent of devs familiar with the tech."
Ideological? Avoiding the risk of being spied on or held hostage is ideological? I'd say it's a compellingly practical reason. Right now if Trump made a move on Greenland, one of the EU's members there's very little they could do by way of reaction except send a diplomatic protest. Maybe a strong diplomatic protest. Even a very strong diplomatic protest. But they would have no ability to treat him in the same way as Putin was treated when he invaded Ukraine, i.e. with sanctions.
"The EU has the clout to do something about it and bust software IP law open"
????
GPL, via coppyleft, is based on software IP law. The EU doesn't need to do anything about that. What it needs to do is stop talking and start adopting it, leading by example.
The sooner it - and HMG - wean themselves off non-local services the better and pivoting to FOSS is the way to do that.
Possibly. It may also have been due to having been buried fairly shallowly. There's no great depth of soil over the bedrock - trench digging is more akin to quarrying - so it may be that the cables are insufficiently protected from traffic damage. On the other hand the crew working on the repair seemed to regard it as a characteristic of the material.
Not sure about buried low voltage. Talking to the guys digging a hole to repair yet another mains cable fault down the road "It was laid when they used aluminium". This was the 3rd or 4th failure of the actual cable in about 300 metres in 20 odd years plus at least two connections to premises.
"They're designed to last two days past the guarantee"
I'm pretty sure the fridge we bought somewhere in the 1970s was designed to last long enough to get it out of the factory door. There was some really cheap and nasty stuff about at that time. Possibly it was the result of the oil crisis and manufacturers were trying to minimise materials by making parts flimsier.
I wish my car's MP3 player would take a similar line and stop pulling info in from a central DB. The info to display,often including album art, is embedded in the file but incorrect album identification is standard, as is album art and its not unknown for the album title to be presented as the name of the track.
If the quality of Microsoft's sources was similar they might accidentally have made an improvement.
"Mr 'One Answer' was earning his keep by diverting many support calls to 'go off and restore your backup'."
I don't think having customers implement a solution that destroyed data since the previous backup was earning his keep. It might look like that from the point of closing calls but what it would really have been earning was a bad reputation for the product.
"I have worked on & ultimately run 'support functions' in large companies "
You really thought it acceptable for support people to be giving bad answers while they were learning on the job instead of being trained?
I moved from Gmail years ago.
I'm not sure whether Proton allows you to have your own domain but that's been my approach for a long time. It allowed me to move ISPs (the ISP email service is a big lock-in trap) and also to move MSP supplier and domain registrar. It also allows for multiple email addresses so that anyone leaking addresses is instantly identifiable and spammers dealt with. There are a few residual addresses on hotmail until I get round to changing them; they are forwarded to my domain address.
Current MSP and registrar is, has been for a long time and likely to continue, Mythic Beasts
Microbiology labs have extraction facilities. The containment of the ISS means that there is no fresh supply to replace the extracted air. Unless the filtering is perfect the recycling of that air will allow possible contamination to build up. The isolation prevents access to treatment. And I don't think the chromic acid we used to use for cleaning glassware would be popular on the ISS.
Lack of imagination virus anyone?
I suppose the simpler way of finding out why things are placed where they are would simply be to ask those building them. It's not like ecology where chance determines whether a seed has fallen where it can grow or not and you need to discover the distribution patterns and examine things carefully to find out why. Nor is it some past civilisation where you have to examine them archaeologically and, again, look at the environment and work out why they decided to settle where they did, or why they flourished and then died out.
These are conscious decisions by people who are here and now and can actually speak if you ask them.
