Posts by fromxyzzy

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Moved off Firefox to Floorp a bit more than a year ago after their tracking, ad and AI moves. Quite happy with it so far.

If I need Chromium I just use Supermium or Thorium. Chrome itself is dead to me.

Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

The old audio equipment maker Alesis (RIP) made a pair of extremely user-friendly (for the time) MIDI music making devices, a drum machine called the HR-16 after it's amazing-for-1987 16-bit sounds and a MIDI sequencer called the MMT-8. Orbital used a trio of the MMTs as the heart of their live setup for years.

Both were loved by musicians for many years after their release because in the pre-internet age, Alesis had in their wisdom seen that a big flat empty spot on top was necessary to fit the PCB in the case, and decided to give it a flip-top with a little manual explaining all of the essential functions. So, if you bought one used for 50 currency units or whatever, you could immediately get to terms with it.

Akai had a help system in some of their sampler OS systems as well, which wasn't terribly useful but an impressive inclusion for one of the more arcane bits of technical equipment ever produced.

Re: It's worse than that

We've abandoned a lot of the UI/UX lessons learned through experience, and ironically it was Apple who both did a huge amount of impressive work (building on IBM's internal work I believe) on strictly codifying their UI elements in order to ensure a consistently usable system across applications, and then with iOS, totally destroying any sense of consistency in interaction and hiding every aspect of the real system from the user. I run an old iBook with MacOS 9 for legacy software and tinkering and the only things that don't adhere to the Apple UI guidelines are video games which were virtually always originally for Windows/DOS. I have an iPad in the loo and I can perform the exact same swipe motion on it 5 times and get 5 completely different results for no discernible reason.

Kids that are growing up on iPad and other touch-screen devices are being taught that tech devices are magic boxes that act in ways that you can never understand because they don't respond consistently and they hide every aspect of the underlying system. Honestly, it's primed them for the advent of AI as well, where they simply trust what the magic box tells them is true and are flummoxed when told that the magic box is wrong, unreliable, and they've failed because they just expect systems to work without understanding how.

Lenovo thought it could surf geopolitics, until Trump's sudden tariff changes

Re: software [for] AI PCs "a bit later than expected."

With any luck these "Large Action Models" will solve us out of our 'Worthless Management" problems.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

Gotta factor in that you'll lose two in SpaceX rocket explosions.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

Re: app Mnaagers / installation of apps

Watch out for the apparently endless variation of snaps and flatpaks and so on, which all work far worse than any package manager and somehow breed more conflicts than anything I've found from compiling and installing things from github.

Both Haiku and Linux get new FOSS Nvidia drivers

This is fantastic news, I've been so fed up with the Windows 11 that was automatically installed on my main media PC a few years ago that I hardly use it at all. It's a laptop with an RTX2070. If I can get native drivers on it I can probably get some more use out of it than I have for a while since getting anything done with Win 11 is a fight.

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

Re: All the idiots vandalising Tesla dearlerships are wasting their time

It's 50/50 whether there's anyone actually setting the things on fire. Leave 'em sitting out on the lot for long enough, odds are at least one will go up and take a few others with it in a light drizzle.

Chimera Linux ghosts RISC-V because there's no time for sluggish hardware

Re: usable if you're patient

If it's too slow, your software is too bloated.

Time to make C the COBOL of this century

Isn't this what ADA was supposed to wind up doing eventually, about 30 years ago? What happened there?

Datacenter energy demand in bitbarn 'capital of the world' Virginia nearly doubled in second half of 2024

Probably also worth mentioning that they're trying to spool up a small nuclear reactor program for use in VA and export to other states.

Safer than coal, at least.

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Re: Aren't Government employees neutral.

Registering for a party is obligatory for participation in primary votes in most US states, yes. Certainly is in Virginia, where many Federal employees live.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Re: pot?

iOS has tried to do this as well, it fights you hard to keep you from seeing the filesystem structure. They claim it's for 'security' (which surely means 'so you can't jailbreak it') but it only really makes sense if you understand it as being philosophical.

Makes it impossible to use iPhones/iPads to get any serious work done.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

It's already happening, web rings have re-emerged. https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/

Incredibly amusing to see Ed Zitron quoted in an article advertising an AI search engine, given his strong opinions about AI.

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

The 'turn on and go' and 'jump into basic' thesis seems to be completely covered by RISC OS, right? Boots instantly, hit a key to reach BBC BASIC, runs on Pi.

Weird I searched all the comments and only one person mentioned it. Checking the Raspberry site, I also see they've removed it from their downloads page and from the list in the Imager app. Perhaps that'd be the place to start.

Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets

Re: " partial LCD dash...It had an 1802 running it, "

There's a great writeup on the 65816 and why it didn't really work out as a great replacement for the 6502 from earlier this year: https://www.userlandia.com/home/iigs-mhz-myth

Intel sued over Raptor Lake voltage instability

Commenter said they're in Africa, eBay shipping is nightmarish enough as is. Although, there are drop-shippers in the US/EU these days to avoid that stuff.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Re: Sadly, this is as old as the hills

You're not wrong, but over the last 10-15 years it's become common practice for much less important jobs. There is a glut of Recruiters and HR people out there with too little to do and too much of a need to justify their own existence.

Re: USA

It is almost amusingly common to read 'the company was hiring for new positions even as they filed for bankruptcy' or similar in the reporting around a fraudulent company's scandalous collapse.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

Ultimately, the point is that you can base your entire company infrastructure on an open source software tool or library, but there's no obligation for the maintainers to actually fix it when it's broken. If there's a zero day, they aren't obligated to do anything about it, especially not on anyone else's expected timeline. It is the perfect example of 'a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part'.

The people who are advocating for this kind of financial support for open source developers to maintain the software recognize this and are trying to provide an incentive, not because of a moral obligation but because to not do so leaves them totally at the mercy of the maintainers, who may consider that maintenance a low life priority. If that software is mission critical for your business, it's a smart business decision to convince those devs that it should be a much higher life priority for them, perhaps even their full time job.

Millions of Android and iOS users at risk from hardcoded creds in popular apps

Don't forget the check you get in the mail three years later for 5 units of currency and a free 12-month subscription to 'dark web monitoring'.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

Re: What is Qualcomm up to?

Apple was working on computer-grade ARM CPUs for a long time before they switched off of Intel, and may not have ever made the switch had Intel not followed a diminishing price/performance curve into oblivion for the foreseeable future. Sure, Apple functionally has infinite money right now, but it's not as if Qualcomm can't finance parallel RISC-V development as a moderately short term drop-in replacement insurance policy if ARM tries to pull something similar.

RISC-V's issues at the moment in comparison to ARM would probably be more related to the swift development of newer standards of implementation, to the point where the newest performant RV chips are already either falling behind or not managing to live up to expectations. See the SpacemiT K1/M1 RVA22 situation. It doesn't help that most RISC-V implementor/manufacturers at this point are somewhere on the level of Rockchip, Mediatek or Allwinner in the ARM world. Building actually compliant and performant RV SOCs should not be a problem for larger manufacturers who are able to take their time getting product to market.

One-year countdown to 'biggest Ctrl-Alt-Delete in history' as Windows 10 approaches end of support

Re: Out of support == no internet.

Chrome is particularly bad about this, which means that every web thing that relies entirely on Google's frameworks like Steam and those stupid Electron containers may have problems (even Edge because MS have absolutely no foresight), but much like the folks in the comments telling people to switch to Linux: Firefox still works on Win7 without issue.

I recently switched to Floorp, a Firefox fork with a silly name and an obsession with privacy. All the updates, none of the weird nonsense Mozilla is trying to sneak in now that Google has totally abandoned any pretense towards privacy and user control and Mozilla thinks they can get away with it.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: "Unless we deal with it at the source"

As much as I appreciate and support what Ocean Cleanup is doing, this is the only realistic solution. Plastics are not recyclable and never were, and no amount of innovation will make them sustainable.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/09/us-voters-distrust-plastics-manufacturers-claims

"Research published earlier this year found that plastic producers have known for decades that plastic recycling is too cumbersome and expensive to ever become a feasible waste management solution, but promoted it to the public anyway."

"In fact, just 5% of plastic waste generated by US households in 2021 was recycled, one study found."

This is figure is not a result of people not sending plastic to be recycled, it is the result of plastic being expensive to recycle at best if not literally impossible to reuse in new products after the first generation.

Datacenters to emit 3x more carbon dioxide because of generative AI

I wonder how many VCs are getting pitched on startups that will use AI to figure out a solution to global warming.

What is this computing industry anyway? The dawning era of 32-bit micros

Re: 386 and 68020 had ports of Unix

SCO never really innovated or improved Xenix/SCO Unix/OpenServer after they took it over. They even wound up purchasing Unixware from Novell and doing very little with that other than maintenance. The driver situation was particularly appalling.

The reason is that they were only interested in massive corporate distribution and the hefty maintenance contracts that came with. By the 90s, Xenix and descendants provided the point-of-sale backbones for a lot of retailers and lots of commodity small-to-medium business servers. However, they put no thought in to potential competition and just assumed that customer lock-in would ensure at least a couple more decades of easy money, just as it had up until that point. They did not think that companies would ever be willing to consider using Linux, even as companies like VA Linux and Red Hat started selling and supporting hardware for the growing market and IBM began spooling up programs to investigate the potential.

So within a few years of their full takeover of the license for Xenix they were on the back foot, then absolutely on the skids, then reduced to desperate lawsuits accusing Linux of intellectual property theft.

Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry's biggest fails

Re: Honourable mention

You might enjoy this: https://flexemu.neocities.org/

Where the computer industry went wrong – the early hits

Re: MSX

Well said. There is one very particular thing that would have wound up being the MSX's Achilles' heel had the standard reached the sort of market penetration that Microsoft hoped (comparable to IBM compatibility - remember that this was not just a hardware standard but a software/OS standard designed by Microsoft and ASCII Corp).

The MSX memory map was left relatively free and open in order to accommodate varying amounts of RAM across model lines and allow compatibility between low-end and high-end systems. Many of the very earliest systems had 8k of RAM, which was pretty much useless but it kept costs down, allowed some BASIC programming and let you play cartridge-based games. However since the MSX standard didn't hit the market until 1983, RAM was cheap and these low end systems didn't really appeal to anyone, so dictating a minimum of 32K if not 64K would have allowed them to nail down a standardized memory map.

The result of the memory map is that different regions (and occasionally different companies within the same region) wound up settling on different memory maps. Now, the MSX standard made allowances for this and properly written software generally shouldn't have problems, but by-and-large what really happened was that software makers just assumed that all MSX machines used the same map as the dominant manufacturer in the region. This meant that, unlike MS-DOS software, a significant amount of MSX software just assumed the RAM was at a certain 'Slot' in the internal mapper and then crapped out when it turns out something else was mapped there. At the time this would have been inexplicable from a consumer standpoint and likely resulted in complaints to the software company, who probably would have just dropped the product and any future product intentions.

This gets even more fun when you take into account the other big highlight of the MSX standard, and the reason for the international popularity that wound up highlighting this problem - non-roman character sets. Since one of the main companies involved in the original standard (and the biggest market) was Japanese, they implemented a fairly thorough Kanji input system. However this wasn't quite standardized, so when they made Korean and Arabic MSX systems, things also broke in new and interesting ways thanks to the memory mapping.

My MSX2+ is a Korean one that I imported a few years back when someone found a cache of them in an abandoned school. Great specs for the system, but despite having 128k it has a very odd memory map that means that software is a crap shoot.

There's a more in-depth write-up here: https://www.msx.org/wiki/MSX_compatibility_problems

The MSX still has a massive following in the Spanish retro-computing community and a significant fanbase in the Russian retro community.

Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard

Re: cue the wailing

I am firmly convinced that changes like this are the product of middle managers desperate to justify their jobs, which should in truth never be anything more than maintenance. Maintaining something that works fine doesn't get you a bonus or a promotion in a dysfunctional company (something that absolutely should get you paid and respected in a company that isn't poorly managed). Breaking something that works fine, in a flashy way, will net you that bonus and recognition.

Who needs GitHub Copilot when you can roll your own AI code assistant at home

The problem is that when the company/person the code is lifted from looks for someone to sue, the buck stops with the user of the LLM.

So your theoretical engineer could get the blame and get hung out to dry, but if you use an LLM and it steals code, you're that engineer and you probably don't even realize it.

AI code is unreliable on both a functional and a legal level.

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

When I started getting in to building hobbyist computers a few years back, the CP/M version in ROMWBW was the only real way to go, so I have several such systems sitting around. I don't have much use for them (the building was the fun part, fighting with CF card formatting was not) and there seem to be far more options now, but I still keep a little Easy_Z80 plugged in via USB-Serial just to poke at it now and then.

Boeing's Starliner proves better at torching cash than reaching orbit

We went to business school, come fly our spacecraft.

Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

I think this got done within an hour of the git going live https://archive.org/details/doom-ppc

Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project

Re: The more process you have the less agile you are.

The people who distribute the funds are usually the ones who provide the least value, and need to be made to feel that they provide the most. Agile is all about dancing around saying that quiet part loud.

Lightweight Dillo browser springs back to life, still doesn't care about JavaScript

Re: Better option.

https://github.com/tenox7/wrp

Web Rendering Proxy

> A browser-in-browser "proxy" server that allows to use historical / vintage web browsers on the modern web. It works by rendering a web page in to a GIF or PNG image with clickable imagemap.

Tesla sued for 'systemic' racism at its Fremont, California plant

Re: In California ?

Only in the cities, go 5 miles in any direction (on land) and it's Alabama in the high desert.

Even the cities are more champagne liberal than anything, quite happy to price out the 'undesirable elements' and believe any ludicrous story about non-existent crime waves.

Scarlett Johansson voices anger at OpenAI's unauthorized soundalike

Re: Is a soundalike illegal?

In the US it is. Bette Midler vs Ford Motor Co. set the precedent, Tom Waits vs Frito-Lay expanded it, it's established law ever since. OpenAI just did it to a woman who had the stones to sue Disney and force them into a settlement, participated fully in the recent WGA/SAG strike where AI and these fakes were a huge issue, and her statement indicates that she is more interested in setting legal precedent than any monetary outcome.

Look to the skies this weekend as solar storms strike Earth

Looks like all english language social media is going to be flooded with photos, because there's an equivalently massive aurora australis that's reaching all the way to the north island of NZ.

Photos all night as far south as Florida in the US.

Chinese government website security is often worryingly bad, say Chinese researchers

Is it easier to break into websites and servers than it is to fully secure them? Or are they just training and allocating all the potentially competent computer security people to espionage instead of security.

The chip that changed my world – and yours

Re: All is not lost.. yet.

The 6502 won in the US consumer market, the Z80 won in most of the rest of the world. MSX, CPC, Spectrum and the dozens of clones. The 6502 was chosen as the basis for designs prior to the point where the Z80 became cheaper, hence it was retained for the major American brands for years as they kept updating their late 70s designs. The rest of the world came a bit later and chose the Z80 because it was more cost-effective and they didn't have the baggage (also the eastern bloc countries figured out how to clone it, which is why they took to the Speccy so much).

Tandy/Radio Shack could have helped make the Z80 more ubiquitous in the US, but instead they threw compatibility to the wind and just picked whatever chip struck their fancy for every new model. Hence, the Dragon.

Z80 remained the processor of choice for business computing, but that's a whole other market really and CP/M was all that mattered there.

More big city newspapers drag Microsoft, OpenAI hard in copyright lawsuit

Re: i know its too late at this point...

Force feed it Timecube.

Loongson CPU that performs like 2020 Core i3 makes its way to Chinese mini PCs

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

It'll be interesting to see how heavily they lean into the RISC-V side of things going forward, since MIPS seemed to hit a wall the last time Loongson tried to push their own CPUs.

Given RISC-V's open architecture it may be more workable, but also given how wildly configurable RISC-V can be in implementation it could wind up being an overly complex boondoggle.

No joke: FTC boss goes on the Daily Show and is told Apple tried to block her

Re: USA Free Market

I don't know, was it Yorkshire Tea? Because I wouldn't wash my ball hair in that swill.

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

How do you even use the modern internet without an adblocker?

Trying out Microsoft's pre-release OS/2 2.0

Re: Pints' on me Brian

It was an extremely common ATM OS well into the 00's, eventually replaced with XP. You used to see them crash once in a while.

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

I'm imagining there's a shovelware netbook somewhere named Kentucky Gentleman.

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

He is truly on the forefront of the sector of the entertainment industry that could be replaced with an LLM and some editors, since his movies and TV shows appear to be made using the mad libs methodology.

Open up a previous script, either his or someone else's, and swap some nouns and verbs. If it makes sense, shoot it and send it straight to streaming. It already doesn't cost enough to make to catch the eye of a Zaslav who would cancel it for the tax write-off.

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Re: "sexist in favor of females"

It's always been a bit shocking to me when I remember that schools often require students to take a class in trigonometry, but statistics is optional.

Best class I took in high school, use it every day.

Re: "sexist in favor of females"

"Dig up, stupid!"