Posts by Sanguma

The many derivatives of the CP/M operating system

Re: Apps? Apps?

Apparitions?

Concurrent DOS

I have laid my grubby mitts on Concurrent DOS - cost me NZ$70.00 in 1995 - but I was never in a position to run in as a faux-server with a couple of terminals or so. And what was much, much worse, iirc, it didn't do DOS games particularly well. But I suspect that was because DOS games tend to write to hardware directly, whereas Concurrent DOS, as something that could work as a server terminal, didn't do direct-to-hardware writing.

I would be delighted to get my grubby mitts on the source trees of it and its multiuser "cousin". I might even dig out my old assembler books and have another go at learning 8086 assembler.

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

Re: The backward compatibility issue

There's hobbyists aplenty, enough for Microsoft to release the Visual Studio Express and Community editions so they wouldn't be tempted over to the Linux camp merely to play with their home computers. And there's leaked Windows source trees aplenty, as well.

If they are going to have to keep supporting truly ancient application software, why not make the support for the ancient MS Windows APIs and OSes, a hobbyist-run thing? Do an official release of the older MS Windows source trees right up to Vista (including the Vistabetion lot) or even including MS Windows 7 under the GPL or the like, make the hobbyists feel wanted, and make their work official.

CP/M's open-source status clarified after 21 years

First PC was a DEC Rainbow, dualbooting CP/M and DOS 2. Didn't do much with it, apart from playing Pacman on CP/M. But, yep, I've owned a CP/M box. Donated it to the local computer history museum after a few years.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Re: Speaking facetiously

As if WinCE wasn't bad enough, there was this moment in time when Microsoft's three-platform offering was Windows Consumer Electronics, Windows Millenium Edition and Windows New Technology. CEMENT. Add aggregate, water, and stir, and you have concrete.

Speaking facetiously

one thing I noticed about Microsoft in the noughties, was how much like IBM as reported by various magazines in the late eighties, Microsoft had become. Arrogant, up themselves - and believe you me, I found an IBM droid I talked to in 1992 about OS/2 2.0 rather hard to take. Then various techies ported Linux to IBM mainframes, both externally and internally, and IBM found itself a Linux and FOSS company by default.

I think the same thing occurred with Microsoft. Enough techies during Ballmer's tenure as CEO were fooling around with Linux and FOSS behind the scenes, and sometimes even talking about it, and Ballmer found himself outflanked. So they jettisoned Ballmer (in no small part due to people losing interest in Microsoft because the 'Net was taking centre stage, and Microsoft had missed that boat with its MSN offering in the mid 90s, likewise the smartphone. Remember WinCE?)

So they've had to adapt, or perish, same as everybody else. And they're taking their time about it, unfortunately. Microsoft's older software's of historical interest - not quite antiquarian - and having legal access to a lot more of that source code than they've so far released, would be helpful. And appreciated.

Microsoft reanimates 1995's 3D Movie Maker via GitHub

inch-by-inch

Microsoft's stopping holding on to everything in the past. Little-by-little it's liberating itself from its "all that's mine is mine and all that's yours is mine" attitude.

I still think Microsoft (and IBM and whoever's got the carcass of VMS) should open that part of computer history (VAX VMS, IBM/Microsoft OS/2 and earlier versions of MS WinNT) up to hobbyists.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Re: Weapons in spaaaace

Aaaand, you've got the problems of control and aiming. What happens if your poor grunt, lost in the fog of battle, angry and upset that some of his mates have been killed in front of him, and not reading his location correctly, gives his own location as the place to hit, instead of say eight metres over the way ... or someone reading his details over his shoulder in through the network and not feeling friendly towards him, "corrects" his details ...

That's the sort of problem that, I suspect, eventually got the proponents of the "rods from god" boondoggle to shut up. There's a similar problem with space-plane Space Marine insertion - to land anything designed to travel at hypersonic velocities just below orbital velocity, you need a rather long runway. No, if your opponent gets wind of this before you actually do it, he can temporarily "pave" the only runways you are likely to use, with all sorts of interesting pavement. A sandwich of oil, sand, and glass on the only runway long enough to use, would kill any Space Marines stupid enough to volunteer for such a mission. In other words, "rods from god" and space-plane Space Marine attack are a glorified form of Evolution in Action, fully deserving the Darwin Award.

Re: For those

The only ones who showed any success were The Boys, the Astro Investigation and Defense Service, as recorded in the documentary "Bad Taste", where they were shown defeating an attempt to begin harvesting the planet for the Crumb's Crunchy Delights interstellar fast food chain.

Re: For those

You mean His Serenity Donald John Trump, Duke of Dorkshit, Earl of Slurry. Apparently, Queen-Empress Victoria, noticing that Walt Disney was getting copyright incentives to keep producing stuff, even though he is now a decomposer decomposed, decided to get in on the act, and raise former President Trump to the hereditary peerage.

Departing Space Force chief architect likens Pentagon's tech acquisition to a BSoD

Lessons from past fsckups

A website I'm in the habit of reading every now and then, Tomdispatch, reminds us that the Pentagon faces no penalties for failures such as the War in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. And indeed, likewise their suppliers face no penalties for being a decade behind, and a few billion over budget. Eg, Lockheed's Technical Learnings of Lockheed for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of America aka the F-35; the US Navy's Littoral Combat Ship

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/05/20/the-littoral-combat-ship-cant-fight-the-us-navy-is-finally-coming-to-terms-with-it/?sh=1202da452587

and other Technical Learnings for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of America aka overbudget monstrosities. What's a few billion between a congresscritter and his/her purchaser? At least said congresscritter isn't expected to pose for sale naked on the block like slaves fresh from Africa had to, back in the day. (A pity - a few more purchasers' suicides from the sheer Lovecraftian horror of the experience would do wonders to keep the rest in check.)

I suspect the entire problem is to do with the "easy money" they're getting in spite of lack of performance. And the resulting sense of entitlement.

Newly released Space Force data could save life on Earth

Re: "Planetary Defense Coordination Office"

What! and spoil International Rescue's fun? Next it'll be "Thunderbirds are Stop!" and that won't be any fun at all!!! (Boohoohoo ...)

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Anyone remember ...

Per Brinch Hansen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Brinch_Hansen

http://pascal.hansotten.com/per-brinch-hansen/

My contention is that his Concurrent Pascal of c. 1977 was a microkernel in disguise, with a bundle of user-level operating system personalities though not much like what we'd call OSes these days.

FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years

Re: RHIDE!

Never got around to using that. The closest I got was using the various text editors that floated around the DOS world at the time it came out, and of course, the very very useful Turbo (Pascal/C/C++) editors. Rhide was modelled after those, amirite?

And then there's RxDOS

Here - https://web.archive.org/web/20181011172623/https://bitbucket.org/ecm/rxdos-7.2x/downloads/ if you so wish. First saw the light of day in 1994 aboard the book

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7408247M/Dissecting_DOS

Another DOS clone, written in assembler this time, instead of (largely) C as is FreeDOS.

A lot of people don't know about it. It's not bad as far as DOS-clones go, and it does (apparently) natively multitask.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a massive black hole spewed out gases that probably helped make stars

Those Tie Fighters howling in the wilderness really spun me out of the story. Now, if they'd only yelped, or barked, or maybe even miaowed ...

Ah, but at what Warp Factor? How does that song go again, that "Warp Factor Number Nine" ...

I'm thinking, a black hole in the centre of a gas-rich galaxy would tend to blast the gas out of the way - that's been the definition of a Quasar ever since the eighties iirc. I'm also thinking, a gas jet at nearly lightspeed is going to take a fair long time and distance to slow down. If a moderate-speed gas jet in a dwarf galaxy will fire up star formation in gas clouds, leading to star clusters, what is there to stop a very-high-speed gas jet from a quasar's heart finally slowing down and running into a thin intergalactic gas cloud and making stars in that gas cloud, thus leading to a diffuse galaxy? Makes sense to me.

Employers in denial over success of digital skills training, say exasperated staffers

Work-shy bosses

Actually pulling finger and getting staff trained is too much like hard work, so the manglement don't do it. Training someone and then upgrading their wages/salary/whathaveyou is again, much too much like actually working, so manglement won't do it and that can be deduced from the oft-times heard complaint that you train someone and then they skive off to greener fields / some louse from some other company poaches them ...

Of course, the person who shows some initiative and goes and arranges some sort of course him/herself, will never get it credited in any worthwhile manner, because, again, that is too too much like work.

From which we may hereby deduce that To Boss is To Bludge. The Boss is just a fancier, much better paid Dole Bludger. Disprove that who can.

Russia's orbital insanity is almost beyond redemption – but there's space for improvement

Re: Use them?

it's a bit like nukes in space

And then Ronald Raygun, the Third Ronnie, actually had the ineffible intelligence to suggest GRASERs - gamma ray amplification by stimulated emission of radiation - to shoot down ballistic missiles. And as we know, weapons need to be tested ... how many aircraft flying from Europe to the US and vice versa, would've gone down with inoperative electronics and electrical equipment - eg, fuel pumps - if he had ordered GRASER tests over the Atlantic?

A plan so cunning you could stick it in your trousers and call it ... anything you like except late for dinner ...

Re: Get it?

It needs to be a neutral, open effort

Precisely. That's why the international Maritime Salvage legal regime needs to be adapted to Earth orbit - because salvage companies operate for commercial, not national security reasons. And other, equally sane reasons such as keeping the coasts clean from a maritime disaster resulting from some doofus parking his big shiny ship on a reef ...

Of course, they'd need to operate in harmony with the national space agencies, but that's no different from national shipping registries ... and you'd have the likes of Lloyds of London to sort out the insurance details and the payments, etc. No alarms and no surprises.

Twits will be twits ...

I came across a little bit of anti-ASAT stuff on the InterWebs the other day, and among other things, it puts the above stupidity - turning a non-functioning satellite into space debris - into perspective - to wit:

The hostile acts and threats of hostile acts include:

the gratuitous production of space debris with the resulting forethought murderous threat to manned space objects, by testing anti-satellite and anti-missile weaponry in earth orbit, whether it be low earth orbit, mid earth orbit, or high earth orbit;

That little bit of common sense has been floating around the InterWebs for over a decade, but as it's common sense, we can't expect the Powers-That-Be to take any notice, can we? That is asking too much.

Talent shortage? Maybe it's your automated hiring system, lack of investment in training

You are aware that Human Resources is the wastewater treatment pond of the Psychology discipline, one which produces reproduceable psychology research the way a bull produces milk? And a cow semen?

In other words, these systems appear to be set up to minimize the workload of recruiters and hiring managers by excluding marginally less qualified job seekers rather than to maximize the supply of potential job applicants.

In another time or place, this would be called "workshy": disliking work and trying to avoid it when possible.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/workshy

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

.What outraged them was the King fucking with their inheritances (and sometimes their daughters)

Kings is basterds!

I am shocked!!!

Shocked, I tell you, shocked to the bone!!!

They neglected to quote Article 33:

(33) All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.

and Article 59:

(50) We will remove completely from their offices the kinsmen of Gerard de Athée, and in future they shall hold no offices in England. The people in question are Engelard de Cigogné, Peter, Guy, and Andrew de Chanceaux, Guy de Cigogné, Geoffrey de Martigny and his brothers, Philip Marc and his brothers, with Geoffrey his nephew, and all their followers.

Remove those, and their whole case falls apart! /rant

Very, very, very stable geniuses, obviously.

8 years ago another billionaire ploughed millions into space to harvest solar power and beam it back down to Earth

O'Neil

described in in his books and lectures as a driving force for space colonization - set up space colonies to manufacture, administer and maintain solar power satellites beaming power to earth. Though he suggested microwaves with huge receiver stations on farmland, and the like.

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

... as a wet week

It's a job-and-a-half backing up from a distro like Kubuntu when you're backing-up onto a portable NTFS drive. It takes quite a long time, and you can guarantee that when you connect it to a MS Windows machine, it'll tell you there are errors that must be corrected.

The sooner the better this gets fixed. It can be a real pain at times.

A beefy Linux 5.14-rc2 and light at the end of the tunnel for Paragon's NTFS driver

I for one

would welcome an NTFS Linux kernel driver that doesn't force me to take my external drives to a MS Windows machine to fix the errors left by attempting to write to them by a Linux driver that isn't fully compatible with the NTFS file system. I've had to do that on several such, and it gets annoying. (Admittedly it would be nice if the external USB drive suppliers sold them for ext4 as well as NTFS ... dreams are free, but that's not what the Dream Police say ... :) )

Now that Trump is useless to Zuckerberg, ex-president is exiled from Facebook for two years, possibly indefinitely

Fired, schmired!!!

Fired, yes, but ... will he be glazed? Inquiring minds wants to know, precioussssssss!

Does anyone have any idea of what sort of glaze goes well with his natural artificial skin colour?

Space junk damages International Space Station's robot arm

Re: Have I got a treat for ewe!!! Baaaaah!!!!!!

Forgot to add, if you're in a country where the language isn't English, by all means translate it and pass it on to your local representatives, whatever they're called.

Galactic highway? With galactic highwaymen?

Shirley you mean hyperspace bypass?

Come on, what's a galactic highway without a Galactic Turpin?

Have I got a treat for ewe!!! Baaaaah!!!!!!

This is what an Orbital Salvage Treaty should look like. If you like it, pester your local MP or Congresscritter to get it discussed amongst the professional chatterers in the national echo chamber. Share and Enjoy! But have fun! Are we there yet?

The States Parties to this Treaty

Aware that the Outer Space Treaty does not cover all eventualities in Earth Orbit,

Aware of the risk of Earth Orbit becoming closed off to new satellites entering it due to space debris,

Well aware of the impossibilities posed by a legal regime that declares a space object the inalienable property of its launching state, particularly when said space object has suffered a collision with another space object and is now in orbit as a cloud of microscopic debris,

Wishing to apply the advantages of the universally respected Maritime Salvage regime to Earth Orbit,

Have agreed on the following:

Article 1: A derelict satellite is defined as one that does not answer the commands of its manufacturer and/or operator due to unavoidable damage, unavoidable wear-and-tear in the normal run of operations in Earth Orbit, or has used up all its station-keeping propellant. Such satellites shall be regarded as derelict in the same manner as ships regarded as derelict in the sea lanes.

Article 2: States Parties to this Treaty and to the Convention on the Registration of Space Objects undertake to augment the Registration Convention by also submitting to the UN Secretary General, the details of satellites on their registry that are now derelict.

Article 3: States Parties to this Treaty undertake to communicate the identities and orbits of satellites on their registry that are now derelict, to the appropriate Orbital Salvage companies.

etc, etc, etc.

China sprayed space with 3,000 pieces of junk. US military officials want rules to stop that sort of thing

With all due respect

(not that there's a lot to be had, you understand) this reminds me of something I dredged up in Reely Trooly Ancient History, about something called The Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 16 April 1856, between the United Kingdom and France, and a group of other naval powers, when these naval powers agreed to ban privateering, that is granting private individuals with ships "Letters of Marque" during wartime permitting them to undertake commerce raiding. And the United States refused to sign, claiming that it would unduly prejudice them in times of war because their navy was so small.

Come the US Civil War, and President Lincoln sent an emissary hot-foot to London to accede to it, claiming it was necessary because the Confederates were eating the Union's lunch with their privateering commerce raiders ... I don't think the Foreign Office - the depositary of ratifications and accessions - was too impressed, and the last I read, the US still wasn't a signatory but had decided to treat it as read, and bind itself by the Paris Declaration.

In short, Uncle Sam will always insist that signing anything will unduly prejudice its own freedom of action, right up to the point when some rival starts eating its lunch because it too refuses to give up its freedom of action, at which point, Uncle Sam gives an award-winning impression of a spoilt child throwing a tantrum because it's not getting its own way - But you promised!!!!

Perhaps someone should give Uncle Sam such an award .... :)

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

Uncle Sam and that saying about Microsoft Windows?

You know, the one about it being a:

thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen bit patch to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.

Uncle Sam says, "I resemble that!!!"

OMG! New free speech social network won’t allow members to take the Lord’s name in vain

Taking the Lord's Name intravenously?

I'm reminded of Abbie Hoffman's Dictum: "Avoid all needle drugs, the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."

Satellite collision anticipated by EU space agency fails to materialize... for now at least

Manifest Density and the US Monroe Doctrine of Earth Orbit

As we might expect, the US will push forward with its "Space Debris Removal by Laser Satellites" whatever anybody else says, and the rest of the spacefaring world will see anti-satellite testing. Given that the US turned down a number of anti-satellite ban treaties over the past few decades, on grounds that were rather thin - if they were serious at any point in the proceedings, they'd've bend bent over backwards to get everybody on board, the way they did with the Law of the Sea Convention, and left no stone unturned.

Proof of the pudding's in the eating, not the advertisement, dear chaps and chapettes in the US govt, so please pull finger - if you know how - and get things worked out ASAP.

'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries

Re: Ah, "agile"

Speedy Gonzalez on a treadmill ...

wrong word?

s/increment/excrement/g ?

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

Re: Yeah, sure, right.

The climate's been going a bit longer than 150 years and any records older (eg history) are ignored because they often demonstrate fluctuations (eg floods and famines) which may be climate influenced.

Like this?

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_IceCores

By the time Alley and the GISP2 project finished in the early 1990s, they had pulled a nearly 2-mile-long core (3,053.44 meters) from the Greenland ice sheet, providing a record of at least the past 110,000 years. Even older records going back about 750,000 years have come out of Antarctica.

I suppose 750 000 years is a bit longer than 150 years, but what would I know? I'm not so highly privileged as to have been born yesterday.

As valuable as the temperature record may be, the real treasure buried in the ice is a record of the atmosphere’s characteristics. When snow forms, it crystallizes around tiny particles in the atmosphere, which fall to the ground with the snow. The type and amount of trapped particles, such as dust, volcanic ash, smoke, or pollen, tell scientists about the climate and environmental conditions when the snow formed.

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/Paleoclimatology_SedimentCores

Year after year, a steady rain of dust, plants, and animal skeletons settles on the ocean floor. As new materials pile on top of old materials, layers of sediment form a vertical timeline extending millions of years into the past. McManus and his colleagues on the Resolution are drilling long cores of the ocean floor to read the timeline.

Quoting you again:

"a hard-science like climatology" Its about as hard as economics or sociology. Far to many variables many of which are ignored because taking notice of them may be harmful to your argument.

Care to back this up?

Re: Nuclear power is a no-brainer

I look at the last (how many) years of various US presi Dents - as in the late Arthur Dent - ranting on about Iran's nuclear ambitions (let alone Iraq's or Syria's), and think, just imagine the fun if the US gets dyspeptic towards your nation and you've got an active nuclear power industry ... drop another bomb down the chimney, blow up all the bacon and the beans, go out to the car and blow it higher, ...

In New Zealand we had a very funny incident a few years back, when we had an active Nuclear Energy booster group operating. Auckland had a power cut, and the Nuclear Power booster group president or whatever, goes on the news to say how it all could've been prevented if NZ only had nuclear power ... turns out it had been a faulty insulator that had brought the whole network down. Of course nuclear power's going to solve broken insulators, innit? That's what it's there for ... :) They haven't been heard from since ...

OMG

@bombastic bo[t], is that truly you!?!

I take it you've never read anything on the history of science. Which would account for your ignorance of the experiments of John Tyndall, Sven Arrhenius, etc ...

https://history.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

They have to breed the way they do to maintain the populations they had / have. Now along comes whitey with his medicine (and, notes the otherwise horrible mortaltity rate there-in), and decieds to do something about it, and actually meets it with some success.

Are you aware of how long it took for the exact same medical methods, etc, to bring the European and European settler state birth rates down? At least three generations, before the average woman decided that birth control was reliable enough, that obstetrics and gynecology was reliable enough, that early childhood medicine was reliable enough for her and her man to stop planning for at least 50% child mortality - JS Bach being a prime example.

And it won't go down if they aren't sure that most of their children will live.

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Re: As an American, I can tell you some Super Bowl secrets

Calcio Fiorentino! I'd always been interested in it, and finally got the opportunity to watch it on youtube.

Well! There's a ball, a couple of teams, and an arena - not a paddock. I thought growing up learning League, Aussie Rules and Field Hockey in High School was rough. We were wimps.

Re: As an American, I can tell you some Super Bowl secrets

I always thought Bowl was a misspelling for Bowel but I could be wrong ... help me out, please - my leaves have drifted.

Re: Test Cricket and the Linux Kernel

I got told off once for body-line bowling! And all I was doing was bowling, not throwing! Sheesh! Some umpires!!!

It's all the bally stop-work meetings. There's a similar problem with Rugby Union - stop-work meetings over this-and-that. next thing you know, it'll be a violent blood sport like croquet or golf, and then it'll graduate to the ultra-violence of crocheting and knitting!!!

Ice Hockey, Aussie Rules, Hurling and Gaelic Football - all the gentle slow-paced codes ... I'm a very gentle, very fragile person, and those are the only ones slow and gentle enough for the likes of me ... :)

Re: Apocryphal anecdote

the games be split into quarters to allow for more advertising.

No, they wanted the players split into quarters, at 25c a quarter ... cheaper that way.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Safe bet

that he won't die of AIDS or rabies or COVID-19 ... what a dim-wit!

Some mothers do 'ave 'em!

The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now?

Problem

If RedHat's already got a Fedora Server, then introduces a CentOS Stream to fill exactly the same niche, won't they run the risk of confusing their customers? Confusing customers - what a way to go - they usually go elsewhere. Anyway, they've sold out one highly valuable brand and I doubt they'll be getting its equivalent back any time soon.

On the upside, AlmaLinux beta's usable. I haven't tested Rocky Linux but it still hasn't graced the download links yet.